Interview With Roger Waters: Musical Genius, Political Activist, Accused Anti-Semite | SYSTEM UPDATE #174
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live daily show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the musician Roger Waters really doesn't need much of an introduction.
His band Pink Floyd is one of the most successful and influential in the history of all of rock music.
Albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall have become among the best-selling and most well-known albums in the last six or seven decades.
But Waters is often at least as well-known these days, if not more so for the political stances he takes.
He has certainly become an extremely controversial figure, especially over the last couple of years, as he has been an outspoken voice against the U.S.
and NATO war in Ukraine and a constant critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the occupation of Gaza.
He has become someone who has been widely vilified in Western media circles and in establishment institutions of media as being an extremist, as being an anti-Semite.
Essentially, every term that could be cast at him, including pro-Russian and pro-Kremlin, have been applied to him as a means to discredit him.
He is currently here in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, where he is performing as part of his global tour.
He started off in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, and then he came to Rio de Janeiro today for a show on Saturday night.
We were able to sit down with him here in the studio for a fascinating and often contemplative and widespread discussion about many different issues, both political and personal.
He came to Rio de Janeiro in 2018 as part of his tour back then, and I was able, along with my husband, David Miranda, to spend a fair amount of time with him during the entire week that he was in Rio and got to see a side of him that I think most people don't see, especially those who are subject to the vilification campaign.
It really...
I think shed light for me on how to think about, understand, and process the views of Roger Waters, and I wanted to sit down with him so that those of you who watch the show could hear the same sort of perspective, the same kind of reasoning and where his views are coming from that I heard.
We spent some amount of time talking about things that you would expect us to talk about, like the Israeli war in Gaza and the role of the U.S.
and the West in supporting it.
The ongoing war in Ukraine a little bit about the word Syria, but a lot of it too was about
His musical career, the reason why he has decided to enter these very choppy and controversial political waters, what is it about him that compelled him to do so, even though it has resulted in a lot of difficulties for him in career loss, including the loss of a contract with his music company, criminal investigations in Germany that tried to claim that his performance of The Wall, which was always a satire of tyrannical
despots was somehow a glorification of Nazism, only for that to spread, including into Brazil, where the Brazilian government warned him that if he came here and tried to perform the wall with that uniform, he could run afoul of Brazilian law and would have police, federal police agents at his shows, making sure that he was in compliance. federal police agents at his shows, making sure that he
The Brazilian government backed off of that, but he has been a person who has been kind of a lightning rod on a variety of issues that we cover here in our show, including free debate and the weaponization of anti-Semitism and what happens to you when you oppose American wars and Western foreign policy and And I really kind of did not expect the interview to go the way that it did.
He was very reflective, very contemplative, in a very honest way, oftentimes emotional.
And it was an interview that I really enjoyed conducting.
I really enjoyed listening to it.
And I think you'll really enjoy the interview as well.
We're excited to show you my discussion in Rio de Janeiro with Roger Waters.
Roger, welcome back to Rio de Janeiro.
And it's great to see you.
I'm so happy you took the time to talk to us today.
Thank you very much.
I'm happy to be here.
Sure, so you're in Rio because it's part of a global tour for your show, and I've seen in interviews you playfully referring to this as your first farewell tour.
I guess kind of slightly mocking musicians who say, this is my last tour, and then they never seem to go away.
Well spotted.
What's that?
Well spotted!
So I'm just wondering though, do you have any sense that you're kind of thinking about stopping at least these intense global tours, or are you going to keep going for as long as you like it and as long as you can?
I probably will stop it fairly soon.
Whether this will be the very last one, I don't know.
I've only done one show in South America so far, which was Brasilia a few days ago, and It does take more energy to pay to 40,000 people or 60,000 people than it does in a 15,000 or 16,000 seat arena, unquestionably.
But I try to stay fit, touch wood, I'm reasonably fit.
I only had COVID once in Europe during that.
We did 43 dates, I think, of 40 in Europe.
Well, last time you were here was 2018, and my husband Dave Moran and I were able to spend a fair amount of time with you, and one of the things I remember both of us talking about was kind of marveling at how much energy it takes not only to do the show, we saw that show, and you know, it's like intense physical work on top of the music, but One of the things we saw was that you're not someone who just gets to a city and stays in your hotel.
You were seeing a lot of communities, meeting with a lot of political activists, with kids.
So you're, at least from what I could tell, you're somebody who comes to a place and gets to learn it as much as you can.
What are your impressions of Brazil as a country, Rio de Janeiro as a city?
The thing I was thinking... Oh, by the way, I met Lula.
Oh, you did, while on this trip?
In Brasilia, yeah, the day before the show.
Because the last time you were here, he was in prison, I believe, about to go to prison, or already in prison.
In Curitiba, yeah.
I tried to go and see him in prison, and they wouldn't let me, obviously.
They were very keen on the idea of locking me up in Curitiba.
Yes, they were!
Because I think it was the day before the presidential election, and they said, if you say anything political after 10 o'clock, you're going to prison.
So that was before this trip?
Or before the last one?
That was 2018.
So I was a bit sneaky.
I went, all right.
9.55, wherever we are in the show, you stop the tape, we stop, and I'm going to do a political bit, and we're going to do it for four and a half minutes, and then we're going to start the show.
I remember that, that you did that exact thing in Rio, really observing the time clock, cut off while mocking it at the same time.
How was the meeting with the law?
Fabulous, you know.
We got on like a house on fire, as you would sort of expect.
We're roughly the same age and we have fairly similar politics.
And I did follow the whole thing, you know, with the previous election here, with the Bolsonaro one.
And so I followed the weird Political polarization in this country, where they're so close.
Well, the election that Lula won in 22, I suppose.
22, yeah.
It was like just barely by, not even two points.
Yeah, like one percent or something.
Right, right.
And that's very interesting to me, because this is almost could be a global phenomenon.
And, you know, and it's what you get when people are in desperate straits, I think, is you get polarization because Everybody is so uncomfortable.
And don't get me started on, you know, neoliberal, Milton Friedman, Chicago boys, capitalism.
Yeah, that's one of the things Bolsonaro brought in is this kind of hardcore austerity.
I mean, I've, you know, I've definitely been a critic of Lula's domestic politics, like a lot of people have.
But on the foreign stage, I think he's one of the most important voices because he's steadfastly independent of the United States.
He insists on this kind of neutral peacemaking role, both in Ukraine and now in this new war.
But let me ask you I One of the things I saw I saw a video of your show in Brazilia the first one you did and at the beginning You address the people that you describe as those who say oh, I love Pink Floyd's music so much, but I can't stand Rogers politics Yeah, and the message you said had for them was basically I'll go fuck off to the bar and when I heard that I thought oh, that's
Basically just being very defiant and sticking your middle finger up at those people But then I also know that you have this new song the bar that is about Dialogue and trying to foster free debate and the like so what is that message that you intended to convey with that I?
Well, if you actually listen, because it's a recording of me speaking to the announcement, it's the same recording that when we were on the road here, it's quite clear from the tone of my voice that it's a joke.
I'm not actually telling people to go and sit in a bar if they don't agree with my poetry.
And obviously audiences all over North America and all over Europe they get it completely and they all roar either with laughter or with appreciation or with something.
So I have succeeded in that it is a good piece of theatre to do that.
I'm sad to say that we have it translated in Portuguese and Spanish and I don't know why both languages here in Brazil but and then they haven't translated far off.
Exactly.
It's just said, like, kind of, remove yourself.
Yeah, retire, remove yourself.
I noticed that as well.
Yeah, well, I only just noticed it and said, what the fuck's that?
Retire cannot be fuck off.
Because it's not how you express yourself.
It's very British, like, oh, kindly retire to the bar, which is most definitely not how you were, how you speak.
That will be the title of my next album.
I'm already thinking and talking to Gus Seyfried who we've just walked together on a new version of Dark Side of the Moon that I made as a sort of homage to the 50 year old version of it.
And it's out now and it's doing very well.
I'm happy to say people get it, which I wasn't sure.
What is it that you want them to get from that song?
From the new record of Dark Side of the Moon?
No, from the bar.
Oh, the bar.
Yeah, we're going on to the bar.
Well, The Bar is a song that I wrote during Covid and I'm just sitting, I'm spending a lot of time sitting at home at the piano and you know and kind of mucking around and also feeling mildly depressed about what's going on in the world and feeling the pain everywhere and responding to it so and I started to write about What it's like to meet people who you don't know as well as meeting your friends.
So the idea is if you go to the bar, the pub in England, obviously you go to the pub and you meet your friends and you can have a drink and chat but you also meet strangers often because people feel that they can join in with the conversation that's going on.
So you meet people who have different opinions to you.
And you exchange opinions with them, but you feel safe.
You don't feel like you often do, or I often do, that if you say something that they, that the man doesn't like, you're liable to be dragged off and locked up.
Julian Assange, our good friend Julian Assange, a case in point, they're killing him.
And they're trying to extradate him to the United States where they will kill him.
How fast, slow, we don't know, but that's what they're trying to do.
For speaking out, okay, he wasn't in a bar.
And he did organise a series of techniques to disseminate information to people who need it.
But for that, which is not a crime, well you know, I mean you are willy nilly a publisher doing this.
This is a TV station so you're publishing.
And for publishing the truth about things to be a crime for which you can be dragged off across the ocean and locked up forever and because they disapprove of your opinion or your desire to share information with the general public, that's a big thing.
Well, let me just interject there and ask you, though, because there was a report this week that came out in Globo that David and I were the target of illegal spying by the Brazilian CIA or FBI, the intelligence agency of Bean, during the Bolsonaro years for three years.
They were reading our emails and telephone calls.
And one of the things I said when I was responding to the story on this show was I talked about how, on some level, When you're attacked and the target of reprisals by power centers on some level, even though it's not easy and can cause a lot of stress in your life, it's a tribute to the fact that you're being effective.
And whenever that has happened in my career, when they've tried to prosecute me or do anything like that, I've taken it on like that.
I certainly think that's true of Julian.
The reason he's in prison is because he's the most important journalist of our generation.
And I'm wondering as somebody who has been targeted with all sorts of character smears and attacks that I think have escalated in the last couple of years, the last 18 months, and I want to ask you about that and why, but I'm wondering are you able to, even through the difficulty of that, Maintain that understanding that it's in part because you have expressed views that are threatening to people in power?
Absolutely.
What you're talking about with me is the accusations of anti-semitism.
Yes.
It's because they have no answer to the argument.
You cannot defend the State of Israel in the genocide that's going on today and tomorrow and the day after.
Unless, somehow, You and I, and all those good people who I met this morning in Rio who care about human rights, intervene in some way to create enough of a noise, a loud enough choir for them to go, hmm, hang on a minute, let's just, maybe this isn't the best thing for me, which is...
Because that's where politicians live they live in a world with how much good is this gonna do me in my view?
That's only my view so So you are right it is to some extent and it shows that you at least have a platform and that people listen to it and that it is one that they do not want people to hear and And my platform is tiny.
It's Paris 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Because I made a little video thing on the 11th of this month.
I was so devastated after the 7th, and then 8th, and then 9th, and then the bombardments in Greece and Gaza.
How do you respond to that?
I actually made a little video and it's had a few million views now, so quite a lot of people have seen it.
And basically I'm sitting there like that and I'm going, this is very simple.
Either you believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or not.
It's a very small question.
So if I'm sitting opposite Netanyahu or somebody and he'll start talking.
Do you believe in the Universal Declaration, those 30 articles, or not?
Well, now do you or don't you?
Because if you do, you cannot be following the foreign policy and domestic policy that you do, because you don't.
You believe in human rights for you, but not for them.
And the irony of this is, A lot of these concepts of protecting civilians and the laws of war and crimes against humanity came after World War II as a response to the fact that we had these two horrific wars and as weapons are getting more potent we decided we needed, we couldn't just say oh well in war everything is fair game, we needed
Concepts that everybody was bound by and it was in part a response to the Holocaust and the the murder of Jews although not only and so to watch Israel then kind of turn around and become the leaders and insisting that that Framework be abandoned or that it doesn't really apply to them is the height of irony but I let me ask you because you've always been a critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and in the blockade of Gaza and the treatment of Palestinians.
And you've always been called anti-Semitic for that reason, as any of us are who defend Palestinians.
I'm the opponent of the whole Zionist exercise.
Right.
But in my perception, these attacks on you have gotten a lot more escalated and a lot uglier and a lot more widespread and a lot more intense than, let's say, the last 18 months.
And you're not just somebody who speaks on Israel.
You speak on the dirty war by the CIA in Syria and the U.S.-NATO war in Ukraine.
First of all, do you agree it's gotten worse?
And if so, why do you think that's happening?
I think they're getting frightened.
I think critics of that whole area of international politics get scared of people telling the truth.
And I try to be as careful as I can to read as much, make sure I'm educated on whatever it is that I happen to be talking about.
There's something, as I've explained before, that I learnt from my mother.
One specific incident was, I'm 13 years old and I'm trying to figure something out, and my mother looks at me and she thinks, that boy's trying to figure something out.
So she says, come here, you know.
She said, what are you... I said, oh, it's just something... She said, you're going to come across lots of difficult, knotty problems during your life, Roger.
And this is what you do if you'll take my advice.
OK, Mum, what is it?
She said, you read.
Whatever it is you're trying to figure out, read, read, read all sides of the story.
Don't just read the things that affirm your views.
Read everything and ground yourself in it.
For instance, if it's an international thing, look at the geography, read the history, find out.
When you've done that, you've done all the heavy lifting, the hard work is over.
Well, what do I do then, Mum?
And she said, The next bit's easy, you do the right thing.
And there was a schoolmaster in the thing in the town hall in Rio today, and he was talking about working with his children and about education and things like that.
And I said, my mother was a teacher like you, you know, and you were teaching your children in your school exactly the same thing that you tried to teach me when I was a teenager.
Anyway, I'm digressing a bit.
But what I wanted to ask you is, when I speak to, say, younger people who are entering journalism or finding a public platform for the first time and they ask me for advice, I always try and tell them, look, when you get attacked in these ways that are ugly and unjust and unfair, Do your best not to take them personally because it's just how the game is played.
The reason that's happening is because you're saying things that they find threatening and they don't want to engage with the argument.
As you said, they want to destroy your reputation.
But as somebody who has been called anti-Semitic thousands of times in the last two and a half weeks or so by condemning Israel's aggression in Gaza, I know that's easier said than done.
So I'm wondering, are there times, even when you have the confidence from having done all this reading and you have the confidence that what you're doing is right, when these attacks and these accusations bother you?
Sure.
When they come close to succeeding.
As for instance, on my European tour recently, the Germans The Israeli lobby in Germany, which is extremely powerful in Germany, you know, they've made public protests for Palestine illegal.
It's illegal in Germany now.
And in France, just all pro-Palestinian protests banned.
Yeah, it's all illegal.
So they're very hot on it, and they tried to cancel my tour in Germany.
Cancel him?
What?
What are you talking about?
And on the grounds that I... Two grounds.
One, that I'm a raging anti-Semite.
And two, that I glorify the Third Reich.
What?
On what do you base that?
On his works of horror.
Do you see he has dressed in a leather coat?
And I go, well, hold on a minute, it's satire, you know, this is theatre.
Which everyone has known, everyone knows The Wall, everyone knows that character that you've been doing for years and suddenly they decided to pretend you were paying tribute to dictators and Hitler.
I've been doing it for 40 years, you moron.
You know, what are you talking about?
And yeah, I had to go to court to get them off my back because In the Festhalle in Frankfurt the local council had cancelled my show and I said you can't do that and luckily I went to court and I won the case and we did do the show.
On the back of those attacks, the ADL, which is an American organisation, the Anti-Defamation League, that's been there for... I mean, I'm happy to say I've survived a number of presidents or directors of that.
I had lots of to-and-fro with Abe Foxman when he was still working.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the new bloke, I hardly know, or whatever.
What did Jonathan Greenblatt, the new book, I'm making a new record of Dark Side of the Moon Redux, it's called, and I've done a deal with BMG, which is Bertelsmann's music group, and they're going to release it because Sonny, my record label, didn't want to release it because it would be seen to be in competition with what Pink Floyd are doing for the 50th.
I don't care.
BMG are a good record.
Greenblatt got about 10 different organisations, like I've forgotten what they're called, the ones in Canada.
It doesn't matter.
From all over, Stand With Us and Creative Something For Peace and, you know, all of those.
They're all Israeli lobby, Hasbro organisers.
They wrote a joint letter to Bertelsmann's, the parent company of BMG, and said, you cannot work with this man, he's an anti-Semite.
And if you do, we're going to remind the public that you Collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.
That threat, they threatened them with that.
No, it's such a potent threat.
Sorry, to finish this up, Bertelsmann's, did they say, fuck you, Jonathan Greenblatt, we're a proper company, and this is a great artist, and we have his publishing, and we supported him, and he's a wonderful, you know, makes great records.
No, they didn't.
They went, okay, and they fired me.
Well when that happens, and they're sniffing round the door, in Parliament, no less, in England, some awful MP stood up in Parliament and suggested that my shows in the O2 in London and in Manchester should be cancelled, just because of some awful MP stood up in Parliament and suggested that my shows So, yes, so that was to answer your question.
Yes, it is uncomfortable at those points, particularly having a recording contract removed from under your nose because the ADL They're a protection racket.
The ADL is a protection racket.
No, they openly say if we accuse you of anti-Semitism and you pay us $500,000, as they did with that NBA star Keary Irving, who recommended a book.
And then they said, oh, there's a way out of it.
Just pay us $500,000.
Which is pitiful, obviously.
Yeah, I mean, it's so blatant and out in the open.
And they're exploiting what, you know, obviously are these very strong and valid residual feelings about the Holocaust to essentially go around bullying this way by just threatening to destroy people's reputations unless you pay them.
And that is classic extortion.
There was, I don't know if you saw, I think we chatted about it briefly, but all that made its way to Brazil because here in Brazil there are a lot of debates about the extent to which free speech should be permitted, whether things that are called hate speech or disinformation ought to be criminalized and barred. whether things that are called hate speech or disinformation ought And there's a kind of pro-censorship movement, I think, in Brazil that is similar to Western Europe but in some way even worse.
And when that was happening, the justice minister here in Brazil, Flavio Dino, said, we think that if Roger Waters wants to come here and wear that uniform that he may very well end up being arrested.
And what happened was the Brazilian left, who are supporters of yours and obviously the base of Lula's government, went ballistic and said, it was the first time I heard them with a backlash against censorship and only then did they rescind it.
Did he say, obviously we're going to consider the context of what the message is.
Have you had any kind of messaging or communication from the Brazilian government about the possibility that you're being watched?
I think they said they're going to put federal agents at your show.
Ho, ho.
I did notice that story as it came up and I confess that I was somewhat disgruntled.
I thought, well, hold on a minute.
My mate Lula, who I tried to go and visit in prison, is the bloody president now and his justice minister is conniving with others in this nonsense.
Because the powers that are behind these attacks, it's worse in Argentina and some other countries.
The Israeli lobby is very, very powerful.
I mean, what's happened to me over the last 20 years or so The thing that pisses me off most, if I'm honest about it, and I am honest about it, for instance, I was involved in a charity, because I was asked to, working for a thing called Stand Up Heroes.
So it was stand up, it was comedians going to the Beacon Theatre once a year in New York and raising money for badly wounded vets.
And Bob and Lee Woodruff are the names of the lovely couple who run it.
And they asked me if I would sing a song or something.
And I went, I'm not sure I want to be standing on a stage showing off around all these people with no arms and legs, you know.
We're having a cocktail party at the Natural History Museum.
Would you come along?
And so I went, yeah, OK.
I can do that.
Sure.
And have a look and meet a few people.
Yeah, OK.
So I walked into the big room with whales in it and stuff.
And there were all these vets and whatnot.
And there was one bloke sitting in a wheelchair, no legs and only one arm, looking a bit on his own, in his dress blues, a marine.
So I went over and I walked up and I kind of stood by his chair and I went, hello, how are you?
Have you got a drink or whatever?
And he was a bit like that.
And then he looked at me and then he went... and he recognised me.
And he went, it's... and I went, yeah, it is.
His name's Dom.
I'm good friends with this man now.
And he went... and before he could think about anything he went, Well, I play the guitar.
And I thought, that's a bit of a stretch.
And he saw me thinking that.
And he went, well, I used to play the guitar.
And I went, yeah, well, and it was just about to get into whatever the hell we were going to talk about, right?
When he went, yeah, I don't play the guitar anymore.
And I went, no, obviously.
And he went, now I play the drums!
He had nothing here.
Here was from there.
He had a little bit stump here.
He had a prosthesis on it with a hole in the end for a drumstick.
And he's a bloody good drummer.
And you've seen him drum since?
Of course I have.
He's in a band called The Resilient.
And it's him and a guy called Tim Conley.
And I'm not going to be able to produce the names of the other two guys who are in the band now.
But G Smith and I used to go to Walter Reed every couple of weeks and work with these guys.
And we put on a show at the Beacon.
This was the point of the story.
Then we did it again the next year.
We moved into the theatre upstairs at Madison Square Garden and the next year which was 2014 so we did it 12-13 and we were about to do it 14 when I suddenly it was the middle of the summer I realized I hadn't had the phone call and I thought that's odd so I called a guy called Andrew forgotten his name who had produced those two shows and said why haven't I had the phone call asking me About dates in early November to do stand-up.
And he went a bit quiet.
I went, get your arse over here.
I need to know.
And he came over.
They said, we won't give you a single dollar more money if you work with Roger Waters.
He's an anti-Semite.
But what about the band?
What about the wounded men?
They can't be on because if they are people will ask well where's Roger?
Who was the bloke called Cohen who paid them a billion dollars so he didn't have to go to prison?
I don't know.
I don't know what story you mean.
He was a exchange and control.
It was insider trading.
It was a big insider trading.
I'll find out and I'll send you his name.
It's a long time.
It's 10 years ago now.
Oh, Steve Cohen is the-- Steve Cohen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, that came from the control room.
Well, he was the big sponsor of that year's thing.
Is it not a pen?
Oh, and that's who basically said, no Roger Waters.
Yeah.
So first of all, let me just ask you about these issues with anti-Semitism for a second.
Yes.
You talked about the horror and sickness and disgust you feel watching what the Israelis are doing in Gaza and I have to say for me, and maybe it's just a byproduct of things I focus on, but I honestly don't recall anything that has made me sicker or more disgusted than seeing the level of suffering that's taking place in Gaza right now and knowing that we're only at the beginning, way closer to the beginning than the end.
It's one of the worst crimes, if not the worst one I've seen in my life.
But when the attack on October 7th in Israel happened from Hamas, what was your reaction to that?
Let's wait and see what happened.
Well, that was my first reaction.
My second reaction was, how the hell did the Israelis not know this was going to happen?
And I'm still a little bit down that rabbit hole.
I mean, didn't the Israeli army in those 10 or 11 camps hear the bangs when they blew up whatever they had to blow up to get across the border?
Mm-hmm.
There's something very fishy about that.
Yeah, we had an Israeli Knesset member on who said it seems inconceivable.
This is the one of the most surveilled places on the planet and there's obviously going to be a lot of investigation.
Maybe not an honest one, but Israelis are angry about that as well.
What I'm asking about though is do you think what Hamas did on October 7th can be justified?
Well, A, we don't know what they did do, but was it justified for them to resist the occupation?
Yeah.
But again, it's what you said, it's the Geneva Conventions.
They are absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation since 1967.
It's an obligation.
But are there limits on the way in which they can resist?
As I said in the statement that I put out after it, I said if war crimes were committed, I'd condemn them.
And I don't care who it is.
And here we are now three weeks or so after.
Do you think there's been evidence that's emerged that suggests they committed those?
There may have been individual things.
I was reading a news story this morning which Grayson, our friend Max Blumenthal.
So there's a long story, which I read this morning, but Haaretz have finally come out with figures of how many people were actually killed and who they were.
On that day?
On that day, yeah.
And so probably the first 400 were Israeli military personnel.
Who are?
That is not a war crime.
No, clearly everyone thinks military officials and military targets or soldiers in Israel are military targets.
It depends if you believe in the Geneva Conventions or not.
Right.
Or the United Nations.
But what about targeting civilians or abducting them?
No, of course not.
No, of course I don't condone that.
But the thing was, Was thrown out of all proportion by the Israelis making up stories about beheading babies.
They even got the President of the United States, dotard that he is, to claim that he's seen photographs.
Of the Beheaded Babies!
And then admitted that he actually didn't.
I mean, you know, but what we do know is whether it was a false flag operation or not, or whatever, or whatever happened, and whatever story we're going to get to, and we don't know if we will ever get much of a real story.
It's always hard to tell what actually happened.
They're calling it their 9-11.
What the hell happened on the American 9-11?
Nobody knows!
Clearly, the official narrative has huge holes in it.
And anyway, let's not go into the 9-11.
But I guess when people, there are two kinds of people, I think, who raises anti-Semitism accusation against not only you, but people like you.
We could criticize this.
One is because you criticize the Israeli government.
The other is the claim that you seem to value Palestinian lives more than Israeli lives.
That's... What absolute patent nonsense.
That's what I was going to say.
What is your... How do you... Complete rubbish.
No, I don't.
This is the whole point of the difference between my platform and the Israeli government.
I believe in equal human rights for all our brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion or nationality.
The Israeli government doesn't.
For instance, just in that locale there, what we could call the Holy Land if we wanted to, they consider that people of the Jewish religion have a completely different set of rights to everybody else.
This is fundamentally important.
That's why in my message I go, do you subscribe to the idea of equal human rights or not?
Because as soon as you don't, you are a Nazi.
And I know people... You can't say Nazi!
The Nazi ideology is not unique to Germans.
It could be anybody who adopts that view that some human life is more valuable than others.
Anybody who is a supremacist That's why they call them animals.
That's why they dehumanize them.
Or you just say, oh, he's, she, they are those people who consider themselves superior to us.
That's why they call them animals.
That's why they dehumanize them.
That's why they are committing genocide on them today.
I'm sorry to grit my teeth, but I weep at you.
No, it's horrific.
You're saying this is the most horrific thing in your life.
It is in my life.
I'm 80 years old.
This is the most horrific thing to happen in front of my eyes.
And yet, the government of the United States of America, where I live... And of the UK.
Yeah, the UK, I don't live there anymore, okay?
Right.
And all the vassal states in the European community are all just giving the Israelis carte blanche to murder two women.
Why are they doing that?
Would you tell me, Glenn?
I don't get it.
It has something to do with some kind of political expediency that I don't understand.
Well, we just had, just about two weeks ago, we interviewed Professor Stephen Walt and then yesterday we interviewed Professor John Mearsheimer, both of whom co-wrote the book The Israel Lobby in 2006.
Yeah, I'm sure you do, which purported to explain where this kind of influence comes from and they were very clear that it's not just the standard obvious response of well there's a lot of American Jews and Western Jews who exercise a lot of political influence.
There's also, you go to Congress as one of my friends who's a journalist, Lee Fong, did and we interviewed him last night too.
And he went and interviewed a bunch of members of Congress and said, "Why is your posture that you want to give the Israeli government anything it wants, that there's no criticism permitted, that they'll never say no to the Israelis?
What kind of country has that posture toward others?
And a lot of them will openly say, it's because we believe religiously that Israel has to be strong because only then can Jesus return and have this rapture-like event.
So they're Christian fascists.
Yeah, they're hardcore Christian Zionists who somehow are Christians and yet don't value Palestinian life.
Well, because they don't subscribe to my view, which is that we're all equal.
We're brothers and sisters.
We're all African.
It was 150,000 years ago.
There were very few of us and we were from Africa and we spread out over this world.
And, you know, various of us settled in different places, and because of the weather and because we intermarried, some of us look different from others.
But we now know, because of the genome, human genome, we know that we're all cousins.
We're all related.
And my goodness, particularly the Jewish people who claim that their ancestors are from the Holy Land are incredibly closely related to the Palestinians, whose ancestors are...
They're all Semites.
If they have geographical associations with Israel and or Palestine, they are all cousins.
They're close cousins.
So this is bizarre.
And do you know what I think?
It simply has to do with wealth and power.
Those are the two defining... Well, why does this close relationship with Israel, this kind of obsessive support for it, promote open power in the West?
Well, they need to promote disharmony all over the world.
The United States foreign policy is basically about promoting disharmony as best it can, creating mayhem, causing wars like the one in the Ukraine.
Which, you've spoken to Mearsheimer or whatever and you've done your reading.
You know the history.
You know the history of Ukraine.
You know that Khrushchev did all that when the USSR was going forward in 1955 or 6 or whenever it was that Ukraine was.
You know all of this stuff but most people have no idea.
Most people buy the idea that Russia I saw an interview with George Lucas, the producer and director of Star Wars, among other things, and he was being interviewed by James Cameron.
It was probably about 10 years ago.
I don't know if you've ever seen this, but he was confessing something amazing, which was that When he made Star Wars, the empire that he had in mind that everybody was supposed to root against was the United States and the scrappy kind of guerrillas who were using inferior weapons but had this kind of spirit that would let them bring down the empire were the North Vietnamese.
And this was, the film was released in 1976.
Imagine what Americans would have thought had they known that.
And it was kind of this very subversive message buried in Star Wars.
Were there political themes or political messages from the start in Pink Floyd's music as you saw them in the 60s and 70s?
Let me tell you this, I think, you know, because at the beginning of our career, 65, 66, whatever, when Sid came up to London to share an apartment with me and blah blah blah, and Sid started to write songs, thank goodness, and great songs they were.
Were we very politically motivated?
Not in terms of the music that we were doing.
Basically we were a blues band until we branched out.
Mainly because of Sid's songwriting.
I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like.
It's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good.
I'd give it to you if I could but I borrowed it.
We don't need to go there into a kind of weird seminar about what a great songwriter Sid was.
Was I political?
Yeah I was.
I marched from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square once and from Finchingfield to Trafalgar Square once as well in the CND.
I was the chairman of the Young Socialists in Cambridge when I was 15 years old and also of the YCND there and blah blah blah.
My parents, my father was dead, he was killed at Anzio.
My mother was a communist Up until 56 when she left in protest of the Russian invasion of Budapest in 1956.
So yeah, my background is steeped in attachment.
You know, the bottom drawer of the desk in our front room was full of Hidden forbidden books with photographs of what Bogan-Belson and Auschwitz were like, in the case of Auschwitz when the Russians went in and freed everybody who was in there.
And so one of my mum's best friends, Claudette Kennedy, you know, she's got the Auschwitz thing on her wrist and she was in a state of total turmoil and terror and I was like, I'm this little kid watching this going on.
Her kids were never allowed out of her sight because she was so traumatized.
I'm getting quite emotional even thinking about it because Even talking about Claudette Kennedy and her children 75 years ago brings up into me what's happening in Gaza today.
When you see that Al Jazeera chief holding his dead son in his arms and they killed his whole family.
And that's happened family after family after family.
And Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak are going, oh they have a right to defend.
What the fuck are you talking about?
And by the way, if you go back and read Lord Balfour's letter from 1917, it's only that long.
It's not.
It's that long.
And the first bit says, Her Majesty's Government looks with favour on the plan to make a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
British Mandate Palestine.
And then the second paragraph says, so long as it in no way interferes with the religious or civil rights of the indigenous people, non-Jewish, who are now living there.
That's the second half of the Belfer letter.
And I know you're humming me, but...
No, I'm not mm-hmming you in the sense that I want you to stop, I'm mm-hmming you in the sense that I agree and I understand and I want people to hear this.
Even then, and that's a year after Mr. Sykes and Mr. Pico had drawn the arbitrary shape of Iraq and Syria and all those things, in the middle of the bloody First World War.
So, you know, what I'm saying is that Zionism failed before it started because it was not a desert.
It was a flourishing Cosmopolitan, many different faiths and peoples, and it had exchanged hands umpteen times, and the Ottomans and the Crusaders and maybe King David at some point, who knows?
But this was not an empty spot on the map where you could take a few million people and say, there you are, now build... No, there was all kinds of peaceful and thriving interactions between Muslims and Jews and Palestinians and... Always!
So obviously there's a group of people who think that simply to be opposed to Zionism, a brand new ideology that didn't even exist until the beginning of the 20th century, is to be anti-Semitic.
And part of me even hates kind of asking you about this accusation because I feel like I'm dignifying it when I do, but the other side makes me feel like, look, People have heard this about you, and so I think it's important to always give you the opportunity to defend yourself, even though I wish that wasn't necessary, but it is.
Do you know how many people there are in the world who know whether I'm an anti-Semite or not?
A small portion.
One.
Do you know who that is?
You.
Exactly.
I live in this body.
This is my heart.
You think I wouldn't know if I was an anti-Semite?
What?
We know what our feelings are.
But I want to ask you about that because there's a moment that you just had a few minutes ago where you got emotional thinking about a Holocaust survivor.
These books that you said you read and were obviously moved by about the horrors of Auschwitz and the like.
Do you have and have you always had Jewish people in your life who are important in your life?
Yeah, of course.
Like I said, I even hate asking that, but I think I want people to know that.
Yes, of course I have.
And do you know what?
Here's a weird thing.
Part of the accusation, there was some weird saxophone player who played in my band for about three minutes in 2002 or something, 20 years ago, and came out and was explaining all kinds of weird stuff, which I Didn't recognize at all in any way.
Why am I telling you this?
I know why.
Because this came out into conversation here.
There's a guy, I'm not going to tell you who he is, but there's a guy who's working for me in my crew now.
He's been working for me for well over 20 years.
And I was talking to my production manager about another kid who was an Israeli kid who was on the crew for the whole of the wall tour that I did.
And who had concerns about some of the things I was saying about Israel.
He was an Israeli, obviously Jewish.
And so he confronted me about it and I talked to him and I've got a lovely letter he wrote when he left saying this was the best years I've ever spent in my life.
I don't agree with you about absolute everything but I admire you and I really hope look forward to seeing you again and blah blah blah stuff like that.
And my production manager said well yeah like and then he mentioned another name and I went who?
And I went, oh, and mentions a specific job.
And the guy said, you know he's Jewish.
And I said, no, I had no idea.
It never crosses my mind what somebody's religion is, or their ethnicity.
I couldn't care less.
It's just, that's how I know.
That's how I'm the one person who knows whether Roger Waters is an anti-Semite, and I'm not.
Why, like I said, you do talk about other issues, Syria and Ukraine and U.S. foreign policy, Western foreign policy, a lot of different things.
But this is an issue of great passion for you, as I can see here watching you talk about this.
They're killing them.
They're committing genocide.
Why is this issue, how did this become such an important issue to you of the all sort of very different types of human suffering on the planet?
It's no more important to me than the Rohingyans or the slaughtering Indonesia after Suhata. - Yeah.
of anybody who was communist for it.
They just curled them and threw them in the river.
That's no worse than the Israelis bombing Gaza.
It's exactly the same.
It's murdering people for gain is what it is.
It's either gain of power or gain of their property or gain of their land.
It's stealing something.
And it disgusts me whoever or whatever it is, and I wasn't there at the time, but for instance the United States, we know that there was a genocide of the Native American people, not just in North America, here as well.
I mean the Portuguese in this country or in Argentina or wherever, Yeah, they colonized Brazil and there was an indigenous population.
So that set the colonialism and it was disgusting and what followed on from it was slavery and that was disgusting too and we're still living with the aftermath of those ideologies which were disgusting and they came from Europe and And they were disgusting.
And we're only just now.
Like, my meeting this morning in Rio de Janeiro here, where they gave me a medal for caring about human rights.
You know, there's one guy who stood up and made a speech, and he's from the Landless Workers, WTS.
Yeah, you know, and you go, come here, brother, let me give you-- because I've read about you.
I know what you're trying to do to save your country from the Bolsonaro's of this world, who want to sell it so they can put the money in their back pocket and piss off somewhere, or stay there and-- Run the police force and have people killed or whatever they do.
I mean, I may be being a bit unkind.
No, I think it's important that people see this kind of strain that drives you on Israel and Palestine is a strain that drives you to comment on a lot of things.
And I want to ask you, there are, you know, musicians, like kind of just cultural celebrities in general, who avoid doing what you're doing for obvious reasons.
You know, Michael Jordan Famously or notoriously said when asked why he never comments on political controversies.
He said Republicans buy sneakers, too and I want to know like I was there a point when you had to debate like am I gonna alienate people with political views who might otherwise like my music or was it just This instinct in you taught given by your mother or maybe other influence to say no I'm always gonna kind of do what I feel right regardless of the consequences or the harm it might have for my country
No, they almost got to me recently, this year, when I was 79 years old, thinking about, oh my God, can I wear the leather coat or not?
Or will they cut my balls off and feed them to the wolves?
And I'll be a homeless old man, shivering in a fucking blanket, you know, by the road.
They're scary, because they're so vicious, and they will stop at absolutely nothing.
So do you regret sometimes wading into these debates, given all that?
No.
No, because... I actually said this to the people there this morning in a meeting, and I don't know if they got it or not, but every year I make the same New Year's resolution, and I have done for maybe 10 years or so, And because I've finally figured out what it is.
And it is this.
I resolve, for the forthcoming year, I'm going to carry on doing the best I can.
So there's no... Do I mean that?
Or trying to do the best I can?
It's not the best I can because I always think it's a terrible burden to put on yourself or anyone else.
You have to do your best!
No you don't.
You have to do the best you can.
I don't know why that's relevant, but it's relevant to me.
No, what I was asking was, I mean, you know, I've noticed before when I take a certain view or when I devote my journalism to a certain topic, you can see the material harm.
You can see people who write to you and say, oh, I'm so disappointed.
I can't support your work anymore.
I can't watch your show anymore.
I'm so disappointed.
You're this or you're that.
Of course, there's a part of you that says, Maybe I would have been better off just not doing that, not having to speak about that, and I guess maybe it's a personality trait, but for me, I just don't have the ability to refrain.
I don't want to go home at night... Well, you're somebody who has to do the right thing, like me.
I don't know where you got your instruction from.
Mine came from my mother.
But it's like, you were talking about early days of Pink Floyd and politics.
You know, my story in Pink Floyd, and it's a big, big part of the Pink Floyd story, was when one day we were making, in 1970, we were making an album called Medal, and it had a long track on it called Echoes, and I started writing lyrics to it.
And the beginning of it was a bit wishy-washy, and, you know, I've heard the albatross hangs motionless upon the air.
It reminds me of the frigate birds outside the Fusillade.
Which is beautiful and I work anyway, and then I suddenly wrote this verse Two strangers passing in the street by chance two person glances meet and I am you and what I see is me and do I take you by the hand and Help us understand and something some some the best we can or whatever it is and no one
Asks us to move on and no one forces down our eyes and no one But no one speaks and no one tries and no one flies around the Sun sort of
Teenage and Slightly Six for me, as those lyrics are, it gives me a slight shiver because it was my heart, this non-antisemitic heart that beats in my chest, telling me that there's something magical about the fact that we're all related and that we're human beings and that we have a responsibility to love one another and to try and figure this whole unholy mess
So that we're not murdering the head of Al Jazeera's children in the middle of a fucking night so he has to go down there in the morning and...
You obviously, you never, if that happens to you, that's the end of your life.
Never, never gonna get over it.
It's like that, I watched again that Farah Nabulsi's little film, it's a 13 minute short and it's just called Gaza Nightmare and she made it after the 2014, what was that, Cast Lead I think it was, that Oh yeah, you mean the Israeli bombing of Gaza?
Yeah, and it's very, very moving and very, very descriptive.
It's about a woman finding a way home through the bombed street and arriving and seeing that there's a hole where her sister's house is and realizing that her baby's dead.
You know, and that's happening all over Gaza now.
And why?
Because the Zionists want to steal that bit.
They want to steal everything.
They want them gone.
And they're quite... To give them their due, they make no bones about it.
There are, of course, there is a resistance in Israel.
For sure.
A biggest resistance.
But they don't get any grip on any seat of power.
Gideon Levy sits there every day writing those incredibly moving columns about what they're doing.
Well, that's what's amazing is, I mean, before this whole thing happened with Hamas' invasion and the like, Israel was kind of on the brink of a civil war.
There's all this tension between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular Israelis, but also this idea that, for a long time, the kind of thing that let American Jews in the West comfortably support Israel was this dream of a two-state solution.
And now, the most important parts of Netanyahu's No, they're not.
don't even pretend to want to, they don't want a two-state solution.
They want to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza and take it over and make it part of greater Israel.
They never did.
Those part people didn't.
I mean, there were people who, Israelis, who lost their lives, like Yitzhak Rabin and others, pursuing peace.
I think there were Israelis who, but they're gone.
They're marginalized.
They're not the people in power any longer.
No, they're not.
Well, they never really were in power, in my view, looking back at that piece of Israeli history.
You know, it's interesting in Mikko Pellet's book, The General's Son, which I'm sure you've read, because his father was, I don't know if he was chief of staff or just very high up in the IDF after the 67 war, when they won that very fast with their sneak I don't know if he was chief of staff or just Let us not forget, they were not attacked by anybody.
They attacked Syria and Egypt in the same minute, almost.
But after it, this guy, Mika Bled's father, went to the cabinet and went, that's it, we've won, we're in a very strong position.
Now we can give Palestine their state.
Small, alright, but we can.
And then we can live in peace.
And they looked at one another and all burst out laughing and went, are you insane?
We're not giving them anything.
We're not giving them a postage stamp.
We're getting rid of them.
Yeah, I think, I mean, when you look at what the Israelis are doing now with, you know, saying, get out of northern Gaza, at the same time pressuring Egypt to open that corridor, they want to drive them into the Sinai and force them to live in tents and take over Gaza and rebuild it, pretending they're rebuilding it for them to come back and, of course, they're never going to come back and that's going to become part of... They can go into partnership with Donald Trump.
That was always his plan.
Let's just turn Gaza into a golf course.
I just wanted, with the time we have left, to ask you a couple just questions about things a little bit unrelated, but still related.
I know you don't live in the UK anymore, for reasons, personally at least, that I understand completely, but I've done a lot of work, a lot of my journalism involved the UK, certainly the Snowden story had a lot to do with the UK, and I've kind of walked away Of all the kind of elite cultures that I loathe, I think the British elite culture is the one I have the most contempt for.
And when I was doing the Snowden story, the GCHQ was always the worst of the worst, worse than even the NSA.
The British media were always most subservient.
And when it comes to war, the British, the modern day British pundit and journalist and sort of politician, seems to have a almost
Visceral arousal for talking about where they like to think they're Chilean This is always the kind of need to posture as tough guys as these kind of people who are just so Steadfast stiff upper lip this kind of mythology that has been fed to them and every time there's a new word They're the ones most aggressively demanding that their government support it I don't know if you agree with that or not, but if you don't why is that what explains that I?
Maybe it's the island people syndrome, the little England island people syndrome.
Maybe it's the traumatic response to all those Danes and, you know, and Saxons attacking, and then the attack, then the Saxons eventually became the indigenous people.
So the Brits originally, You had the Norsemen and they were constantly attacking this little piece of plum on the other side of La Manche.
So maybe it's developed from that and of course there's a huge history as well of being the most successful We don't know because we weren't there.
invading, stealing, plundering armies of all by far for hundreds of years.
And so maybe they remember that as the good times, because I guess if you are the conquistadors, maybe there's something addictive about that.
We don't know because we weren't there.
I wasn't there.
Yeah, but it gets passed down culturally, I think, through the generations.
And Churchill, you know, they build the mythology.
Churchill was a complete arsehole.
Everybody knows him, who can read.
This is the problem.
I mean, what he did with the treatment of India and just a lot of his comments.
That was only 30 million people.
Yeah, yeah.
In a year.
So, just a couple more questions and then we'll end.
But one of the, I think, A lot of what we've been talking about has to do with an attempt to shut down debate.
You have the song The Bar that's about that kind of debate, the ability to disagree without this recrimination.
I think calling people like you anti-Semites is a way of trying to prevent there from being a real debate.
Everybody now sees your example and knows, oh wait, if I speak up and criticize, that's going to happen to me and I don't have the same ability that Roger Water has to protect myself from it.
It's a very effective means of Closing debate.
But another one that has become increasingly popular in the West is finding all sorts of ways to censor and control the flow of information over this innovation that was supposed to be the thing that would transform and liberate us, which was the Internet.
And there's all kinds of justifications offered for why that needs to happen.
There's too much hate speech.
It's too toxic.
There's a lot of disinformation and deceiving people.
What is your view of the claim by governments, Western governments in particular, that they need to be able to control the limits of speech and political debates in order to protect people from hate speech?
That's one of the few honest things they say.
They say there's no way we could survive and do what we're doing because
They wouldn't admit this but they are destroying the planet and they're doing it hand over fist because all of this stuff perpetual war for instance is a smoke screen that's covering up the thing that we don't need wars to destroy the planet climate change is doing it if we don't go to the bar sit down what would you like a half a bit of the right what are we going to do about this and try and figure some things out and that the only way that the human race can find a way
of organizing things so that most people have a roof over their head and access to education and health care and all those things that mean a lot to all human beings is by cooperating with one another and tossing the profit motive out of the window because it doesn't belong in life with us if We're going to lead a decent life where we can have amateur theatre.
Nobody can.
Where I live now in the United States, nobody can get from paycheck to paycheck except Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and about four other oligarchs.
I mean, I know I'm exaggerating.
But inequality has exploded and the wealth concentration, especially with COVID, got way worse than ever.
Well, let me ask you, as the last question, because this is what I wanted to end with anyway, which was, you know, we were talking about Israel and Gaza before, and this idea that the Israelis don't even really pretend any longer to believe in a two-state solution.
And the question then becomes, well, do you have any optimism at all about how this conflict can end?
But I want to ask you that more broadly, about all the things we've talked about, the wars, and the suffering, and this inequality.
Are you optimistic?
And if so, why?
Am I optimistic?
Not really.
But... The only way that we can change this is through people power.
All the people power.
And we are a majority.
There's a song in my... There's a verse in my song, The Bar, that says, Come on in here, sister, and sit a spell.
You are most welcome in the bar.
That's us helping the old homeless lady.
We may seem few, but we are many.
Have you been travelling for... and we are many.
But they control the media, so they control the narrative.
And so, so long as they've got Richard... Rupert Murdoch, rather, and a few other oligarchs telling us what we are allowed to and what we're not allowed to...
Listen to, read and believe more is why all this stuff about Zuckerberg and his connections and Google's connections with the Pentagon and the CIA and the meetings that they have all the time and how they're making policy are terrifying beyond all belief because we've all read George Orwell and we've you know and so
And truth speak and all of that.
So how do we put our shoulders to that wheel and get the wheel to move even enough that we haven't just completely abrogated, not abrogated, got rid of our responsibility that we have as individuals to say no.
And human rights is the brick upon which we have to build.
Because it's the only really sensible idea that has come since 1789 and the end of the divine right of kings.
They literally believed in feudal times that there was God and then the king.
And then the clergy, and then the nobles, and then everybody else.
And the everybody else, the Sankula, were irrelevant, completely irrelevant.
Well, the Enlightenment was just going, hang on a minute, this doesn't...
This doesn't make any sense of any of the science that we actually know.
And so, how can we define that?
Well, you do that by saying, no, this king is actually no more important than this serf, in human terms.
And this serf needs to have exactly the same rights under the law Not under God, or under the King, or under the nobles, or under people who went to fucking eat under the law as this guy.
And we don't have that.
And it's partly because the people who run the governments, particularly in the United States of America, refuse to subscribe to international law.
They are not signatories to the Treaty of Rome.
Or the Hague, or any of these things that they charge Putin with.
They just don't accept the legitimacy that's applied to them.
Exactly.
And they pick and choose.
They cherry-pick all of these rights issues.
So that is, if all of us went down the pub and went, Papers!
How many of you agree that you should have the same rights legally as everybody else in the world?
That includes all the Chinese and the Russians, by the way.
Do you think that we should all have the same rights under universal law?
Yep!
If we could get the world and look at it and give everybody a voting slip, I bet you there'd be more hands go up than stay down.
If you asked we the people that so we the people have to be given our voice and and and and acknowledge that like in the United States where I live the system political system is completely corrupt and broken down has nothing to do with the will of the people or democracy or anything else And it's clearly, at the moment, US foreign policy is run by a group of, well, there's a dotard at the top.
Poor Joe, I mean, he can hardly... It's elder abuse, really.
It's awful!
Well, I'm happy my question survived the relentless assault that you launched at them, and actually, what I'm really most glad about having sat down and talked to you is that so often there's a caricature of people created, and
It works because people who believe it don't really get to hear very much from or get to know the person who's being vilified and maligned and so having gotten to know you some and then getting the chance to sit down in places like this and listen to you, I wanted other people to see what I've seen and so I hope they will and I'm so happy that we got to find some time to sit down and talk again.
Well, me too.
I'm just going to say this one thing.
I wrote a radio play about 10 years ago and it's about a small child in Northern Ireland and his grandfather's babysitting.
Anyway, the kid has a nightmare.
Grandfather goes in and the kid says, Grandpa, they're killing the children.
And the grandfather says, no, no, no, that was in the trouble, that was years and years ago.
He said, no, grandpa, I'm not talking about here.
I'm talking about over there.
And the grandfather says, we'll go and find out.
And the rest of the play is about him finding out.
And they want the answer to this question.
Why are they killing the children?
And that's the question I want answered today by these motherfuckers.
Yeah, that is a question that I think is both vital and very difficult to answer.