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Dec. 2, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:31
Roger Waters : Campaign for Peace.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024.
My guest today is the world-renowned Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd and a courageous and acclaimed anti-war activist throughout the world.
Roger, it's been a pleasure.
I have longed for a long time to meet you.
We met a while back, but it was like this.
It was through a Zooming platform.
It wasn't in person.
But to say that I admire your work is to be guilty of an understatement, and to say that I am happy that you're here is to be guilty of an understatement.
But welcome here.
I hope we present you with a large audience, and I know that they will truly appreciate what you have to say.
I'm really happy to be here.
Thank you, Roger.
In my reading about you and watching some of your clips, I learned of the influence that your father had on you, his personal courage and heroism, his anti-war activism, his belief that the Ten Commandments, at least thou shalt not kill, should be taken literally until a moment came in his life when a monster named Adolf Hitler was trying to conquer much of Europe.
And your father changed his mind, and I guess he never came back home.
How did your father influence you, Roger?
Well, that's the story in a nutshell.
He never came back home.
So they started to come home when I was about two, you know, suddenly, because most of them were away.
And I was at nursery school when I was two because my mother was a schoolteacher.
And suddenly these blokes, either in uniform or in mufti, Gotten him up to change back into after the war.
Started picking their kids up from school because they hadn't got jobs.
And mine wasn't there.
So I started demanding from my mother where my father was.
Where is he?
Where is he?
And she said, sorry, I forgot to turn that off.
Silence that now.
It happens to all of us.
It happens to all of us.
It's not Randy, extraordinarily enough.
I'm sure Randy's watching us.
Randy, I know you're out there.
Randy is the mutual friend.
Randy's the Randy Credico, who's the mutual friend that introduced us.
So how did you learn what happened to your father?
What's that?
How did you learn what happened to your father?
how did you learn heroin yeah it's all in my memoir but it's like you know missing presume you know Missing in action.
What are you talking about?
In Italy, darling.
Where's Italy?
Apparently, I said to her, well, I'm going to go and get him.
I'm going to go in a tractor.
Because, too, that was the most powerful thing I could imagine.
And my mother told me, you can't go and get him in a tractor.
It won't make any difference.
And she explained it again.
I said, well, in that case, I'm going to go in a double-decker bus.
Thinking that that might do it.
And it didn't.
So I've spent a lot of my life doing somersaults in any man who will stand still long enough to watch me somersault in order to impress my dead father.
He was, as you said, something of a hero because he was a Christian when he was called up in 1939.
So he told the conscription board that he couldn't kill anybody because of his religious faith.
And they accepted that.
So, can you drive, Waters?
And he said, yes, I can.
Could you drive an ambulance?
Yes, I could, sir.
He said, well, London Ambulance Service, put him down, send him off.
And so that's what he did until he realized in 1941 that his politics and his humanism trumped his Christianity, though obviously there's a lot of humanism in the Christian faith.
if you actually follow the teachings of Jesus and forget about all that early stuff about sacrificing your children to show God that you love him let's not go there anyway so that was my father so yes I've lived with that and it's had a huge effect on me now we'll fast forward to a year ago when you addressed The United Nations Security Council.
Here's what you said.
We the people wish to live.
We wish to live in peace, in conditions of parity that give us the real opportunity to look after ourselves and our loved ones.
We are hard workers and we are ready to work hard.
All we need is a fair crack of the whip.
Maybe that's an unfortunate choice of idiom after 500 years of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery.
Imperialism, colonialism, and slavery.
What do you think is the goal of those governments, particularly the five permanent members?
Who did nothing to relieve the suffering in Ukraine or the suffering in Gaza?
I'm not sure that you can lump them together, those five permanent members of the Security Council.
And the Security Council obviously is a hugely important conversation, because until we reform the UN and give it some teeth and remove the power of veto from those five permanent members, there is no way that...
The UN cannot impose international law under its present circumstances.
So it needs reform.
Get rid of the veto in the Security Council.
Make the United Nations That would be my advice to them all.
And the American governments, of course, have used their veto in the Security Council to prevent the condemnations of genocide and to prevent rational movement.
Why do you think the United States is funding genocide in Gaza?
And what happens to you when you refer to it as genocide?
Well, this is the major conundrum, is it not, facing us all.
In my preparations for this program this afternoon, I, by chance, a couple of days ago, was listening to Malcolm X's ballot.
A bullet speech from 1964.
And he talked a lot about revolution and he talked about how all revolutions to date had been very bloody.
And it struck me that what we need desperately on the planet Earth is the first major bloodless revolution.
And it is a revolution, I think.
It's already started.
And it's there in front of our eyes all over the internet.
Thank goodness for independent media like this program and like The Grey Zone and many others and Electronic Interval and so on and so forth.
Because it's giving us the information we need.
The mask is now off.
The mask that used to cover the pretense in your great country that your great country cared about human rights.
It cared about freedom, it cared about democracy, particularly it cared about the freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but mainly that it cared about human rights.
The mask is off.
The fact that the United States, both in this presidency with Genocide Joe and almost certainly with the next presidency, Donald Trump, is 100% behind.
The genocide of the people of Palestine.
And as we watch day by day, the situation getting worse and worse, particularly in northern Gaza now, where there are, how many do we think, 700,000 Palestinians being starved and shot to death daily, all day, every day, and all night, every night.
And the United States is saying, your government is saying, that's okay.
So be it.
They could have stopped it on October the 8th or 9th or 10th or 20th or at any point in 2023 or at any point in 2024 just by saying, no, this goes against everything that we, the American people, stand for, i.e.
freedom, human rights, democracy.
We are not going to allow you to do it anymore.
And they didn't.
So that is why there is this bloodless revolution going on where we, the peoples of the United Nations, are taking to the streets.
In England it's every Saturday.
Last Saturday there were between 150,000 and 200,000 people in the streets of London marching to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Now, they are coming under attack from Keir Starmer's government, who is setting militarized police upon anybody who protests the genocide, which is extraordinary.
So, I'll stop talking.
I don't know, I could listen to you all afternoon, but is there no freedom of speech in Great Britain, in London, if the speech that you utter is contrary to what the government wants to hear?
Well, they can hear us now, Judge.
Thank goodness.
That's why you and The Grey Zone and Electronic Intifada and all the other independent media and the voices of John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs and Aaron Marte, who I watch on your show every day, I watch them.
I watch it a lot, I promise you.
That's why I'm so happy to be on it.
Why the hell does it get me on it?
Thank you, Roger.
It's quite a compliment.
No, but so we are still there.
But with Elon Musk in the government, how much longer we will be allowed to say what we want to say?
How much longer independent media can survive with people like Elon Musk as members of the government of the United States of America?
It remains to be seen.
That is why we the people have to continue to take to the streets and let our feelings be known because we love our brothers and sisters and we demand, billions of us demand every day that all our brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of their ethnicity or their religion or their nationality must have Equal human rights as prescribed by the Universal Declaration in Paris on
December the 10th, 1948, approximately eight months after the Nachbar started, which was in May, 1948.
Also as promulgated by the American Bill of Rights ratified in 1791.
And to the support of which, to the faithful support of which every president takes a solemn oath, of course we know that they don't follow up on it.
Here's a little bit more of your address to the United Nations Security Council a year ago, Roger.
Please help us.
To help us, you may have to consider our predicament, and to do so, you may have to take your eye off the ball for a moment, to put your own goals momentarily to one side.
What are your goals, by the way?
And here maybe I direct my inquiries more to the five permanent members of this council.
What are your goals?
What is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
Bigger profits for war industries?
More power globally?
A bigger share of the global cake?
Is Mother Earth a cake to be gobbled up?
Does not a bigger share of the cake mean less for everyone else?
It's simply beautiful and very powerful.
I mean, what is the goal of government today but to expand its power and retain its power?
Governments were, at least in the free world, instituted among men, it was all men in those days, to preserve, protect, and defend human liberty.
Governments couldn't care less about human liberty.
Government is essentially the negation of liberty.
Yeah, well, you know, we carry with us, all of us, willy-nilly, The burden of the European policy of imperialism handed down to us by the Romans from the 11th, no, from before then, from the biblical times, in fact.
But we Europeans, as soon as we figured out how to build boats that were big enough, the Portuguese and the Spanish and the English sailed off around the world.
We found places that had stuff that we wanted to steal, killed all the people and stole all their stuff.
And that is the burden that we carry.
We carry the burden of the belief that in some way we were superior to these indigenous people in all these lands.
And that it was okay to murder them and steal everything that they had and steal their land.
And we are still carrying the remnants of that.
But some of us, you're not.
I'm not.
But unfortunately, the rules of the Security Council still lingers, and white supremacism is still with us, and it is a very evil influence on this beautiful planet that we call home.
The British used to have a phrase, "The sun never sets on the British Empire." You know that from your youth.
empire has been liberated, or at least we'd like to think so.
And yet it was the then Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, pretty much a buffoonish fellow, but vested with the powers of that office who flew to Kiev to persuade President Zelensky not to accept A peace treaty, 126 pages, every page initialed by both the Russians and the Ukrainian negotiators.
Not a shot would have been fired.
And Boris Johnson said, we'll help you out, we'll back you up, look at the strength that we have, and resulted in 10 million Ukrainians fleeing the country and 600,000 Ukrainian boys dead.
Do the British people Or are they no more supported than the American people support the genocide in Gaza?
Well, isn't that a fascinating question?
This brings us back to media again and to newspapers and mainstream media and what the narrative is that we are told.
You know, this just popped into my head, so it may sound crazy, but I'm going to say it.
Another member from Pink Floyd made a recording of a nationalist Ukrainian song back then in 2022 after the Boris Johnson affair.
April 2022 was when Boris Johnson went and prevented An outbreak of peace because it was all sorted.
And Boris Johnson, Poodle Johnson, as he's known in my country, went off like a good little poodle and did the bidding of his masters in Washington, which to say, no, we don't want peace.
We want, we don't care.
It's exactly what Lindsey Graham has been saying again and again.
He probably says it every night on his knees at his bedside.
Dear God, I don't care how many Ukrainians.
So long as we weaken the Russian bear, at least to some small extent.
You know, it's insane, obviously.
I wrote emails to people.
I wrote emails to Mrs Zelenska, as she's known, suggesting that peace might not be a bad idea.
what they said was, well, all you have to do for us to have peace in Ukraine is change the regime in Russia, fire Mr Putin, and give us back the Crimea.
And then they would not, though, go to...
I'm sorry, I'm jumping a bit here.
In a place called The Bar, where we can all go, we can have a drink if we want, and we can speak to our friends, but we can also talk to strangers.
And we don't all have to have the same opinion about everything, but if we're going to live together, we have to talk.
Talking to one another is the most important thing, particularly in diplomatic relations between countries that don't necessarily agree about everything.
The United States of America has refused to speak to the Russians about any considerations of mutual security issues in Eastern Europe for the last 30 years.
Just refused to talk to them.
So what can you expect?
You have to talk to people.
Will Trump talk to them?
I hope so, because Biden has refused to.
Let's see.
Well, I hope so as well.
What happened to you in Tel Aviv when you went to perform and you were discovered as to who you are, a world-renowned figure carrying a British passport in a United Nations vehicle?
What happened there?
Well, I have to say that I accepted an invitation to perform in Tel Aviv at Haikon Park in 2006 until people started emailing me and saying, "What are you doing?
Do you know there's a brand new organisation called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions?" And it would be much better if you joined that movement and did not go It's a long story.
I actually compromised at the end.
I cancelled my gig in Tel Aviv.
But I did play at a peace village called Nevis Shalom.
Also, in Arabic, it's called Wahat al-Salam.
And I did a show to 60,000 people.
And that's the only time, obviously, I've ever performed in Israel.
The one you're talking about is the next year.
I went back.
I drove all over the West Bank.
I went and talked to the elders in Janine.
I talked to everybody that I could.
and I went everywhere that I could.
And I was staggered This is 2006.
So I've been doing this for, what, 18 years now, since then.
They treated me, the Israeli children manning all the posts, and there are many of them, and all the checkpoints, they all seemed to be teenagers, and they treated me with absolute You know why?
Because I was in a United Nations vehicle.
The United Nations are seen as the enemy, because they were trying to moderate the situation.
And these young Israeli soldiers did not want moderate.
I'll tell you, the one thing that really got to me was, this isn't a bad road, driving through the West Bank this is.
Allegra Paceo was the name of the lady driving me.
She said, yeah, but you are only allowed to go on this road if you're Jewish.
And I said, don't be ridiculous.
That's insane.
Imagine deciding you're in New York and you want to drive to Philadelphia down the I-95 or whatever that road is, the New Jersey Tempe.
And you turn up at the first, you know, checkpoint.
Can I see your Christian card?
What?
You can't go on this road unless you're a Christian.
Don't be silly.
And that's what it is.
Literally, it's literally that.
when that hits you in the face you say well hang on a minute i'm i'm not this road though if you live here you cannot go on this road unless you're Jewish and I just That struck me.
And obviously, even then, It's illegal.
Do you see those few red roofs over there?
That is actually a settlement.
It's also illegal.
All of these buildings that you're seeing near this bright, shiny road are illegal because it's on occupied territory.
The UN decided upon a partition in 1948, and they drew it on a piece of paper.
And there were some arguments about it, but it's still the idea exists.
So all of these settlements are completely...
And this is why we need to get in the bar.
Talk to one another.
And someone is going to have to explain to the Israeli people they have to move.
Or they've got to figure out how to satisfy the needs of the indigenous people who they are murdering on a daily basis.
So talking is absolutely difficult.
Thank goodness you and I are talking here today and that we keep these channels open.
Roger, will you come back and talk to us again?
This is deeply moving.
And you read my mind.
I was going to ask you what advice do you have for the thousands who are watching and the hundreds of thousands of fans you have around the world, probably millions, and you've already given it.
The answer is talking, even though...
If you go to the Columbia University campus not far from where I am and talk the way you just spoke, the police will gently nudge you away.
If you stand not far from 10 Downing Street and talk this way, the police will gently, maybe not so gently, nudge you away.
But you have to be willing to resist that nudging.
And they are.
Judge, your brothers and sisters and mine are out in the streets, in their hundreds of thousands, in their millions, all over the world.
And you won't see it all over mainstream media, but you will see it over independent media.
And that's my message.
My message to any fans of mine, never mind my fans, there are a tiny number of people, to my brothers and sisters in the global choir, raise your voice.
Sing.
Louder.
Do not be put off by the militarized police.
You are right and they are wrong.
Genocide is always wrong.
Israel does not have the right to commit genocide.
It is not an acceptable form of defense.
So keep doing it, and you kids at Columbia, and you kids in all the other universities.
I talked to kids up at McGill in Canada last week, did a thing like this.
Talk, talk, talk, and march.
God bless you, Roger.
Will you come back again and chat with us?
Of course.
Wild horses couldn't keep me away.
to quote the rolling stones though it's hard to quote them on much else i have to say God love you, lad.
We'll see you again soon.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Judge.
Bye-bye.
What a great, if I may say so myself, what a great guest.
As we say in this business, what a great get.
I thank my friend and colleague Randy Credico for arranging this, and I hope Roger will come back again.
And we have coming up at 3 o 'clock this afternoon.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski and a full panoply of all your usual favorite Judging Freedom guests coming the rest of this week.
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