Roger Waters and Joe Rogan debate Israel’s apartheid policies, tracing his activism to 2005 after canceling a Tel Aviv show due to BDS pressure. He witnessed Palestinian oppression firsthand but faces accusations of antisemitism for criticizing systemic segregation, like Jerusalem’s religious road divides. Waters links U.S. foreign policy—from Iraq’s WMD lies to Ukraine’s destabilization—to elite-driven chaos, citing Pentagon plans targeting seven nations and Libya’s resurgent slavery. His memoir, written during lockdown, became unexpectedly poignant, while his touring ethos demands daily show revisions. Epstein’s death and Maxwell’s trial highlight unchecked power, with Waters dismissing conspiracy theories but acknowledging systemic protection of elites. Ultimately, he argues for peace over perpetual war, framing dissent as necessary—even when suppressed by media and governments. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it is true that if you start playing pool against somebody you don't know and you discover that they do understand that control of the cue ball is everything, then that's something.
Well, first of all, it's an honor to have you in here.
I'm very excited.
But second of all, you're in the middle of a lot of things.
You've got your tour.
You've got a lot of controversy going on.
I really enjoyed that conversation that you had with CNN because that kind of conversation is rare to see on air and see someone as informed as you are to have these opinions and express them so honestly and bravely.
And actually, my last kind of engagement with him, with Michael Smoconish, I'm talking about, right, the interview, was when I was playing in Miami a few years ago.
And the local Jewish community decided that I shouldn't be allowed to use local school children to sing Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, because all during the war...
The tours that I did, I always used local children, preferably from, you know, undernourished communities, to come and sing with me, between 8 and 12 of them every night.
And they would come in, having listened to the song a bit, and I would rehearse them at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
And then, boom, at 8, they're on stage singing.
And they get very excited, obviously.
But it's a wonderful thing for them, but also for me and also for the band, have these children come and perform with us on stage.
And the mayor of North Miami Beach or wherever it was came under some pressure from the local community.
And they weren't allowed to play, so I got some other kids.
Let's get that clear straight away, if you don't mind.
Because I'm obviously not.
You can study my record going back as far as you want.
Yeah, but that's always the objection because I support BDS and because I have for the last 16 years or so.
BDS? You know what BDS is.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
Okay.
It's a movement that was started in 2005 in Palestinian civil society and it stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
And so it's a movement to try and shine a light on the predicament of the Palestinian people, particularly in the occupied territories, but also, I guess, in Israel itself.
Using boycott and divestment from companies like Caterpillar or Hewlett-Packard, people like that, who deal in the illegal settlements in the occupied territory.
Sanctions, well, there's not many people out there who are powerful enough to impose sanctions on other people.
And most of those with that much power are allies of the Israeli government and so wouldn't do so.
But anyway, that's what it is by and large.
And since then, we have made great strides in that movement, and it's a much bigger movement than it was.
And in consequence, the sort of battle lines have been drawn, but it's got more intense.
And it's slightly less gentlemanly sport than it was 16 years ago, in my experience.
It was largely unknown that there was a problem at all in the Holy Land, certainly by most of the public in this country, and where I'm from, in the UK as well, and in me.
I mean, I had accepted back in 2005 or 6, one of those years, to do a gig in Tel Aviv.
I was asked in the middle of a European tour, hey, Raj, they want you to go and do a gig in Tel Aviv.
And I went, yeah, right.
I didn't think twice about it.
So that's where I was then.
So I'm not blaming people for not having known about the Zionist project since 1948 and everything that had happened.
Although I was vaguely aware of the Yom Kippur War, the 67 War and the 75 War and so on and so forth, I knew a little bit about the history but I wasn't really au fait.
And that's how I learned, because as soon as I said I would do that gig, I started to receive emails from supporters of BDS, although it was only five or six months old at the time, mainly from North Africa to start with.
But then I got an email from Omaba Guti, who was one of the sort of founding forces behind the beginnings of BDS. And he tried to persuade me to cancel the gig, which had sold out, of course, in a few minutes, you know.
And eventually I was persuaded to cancel that gig.
But as an act of compromise, as I thought, I feel as if I'm repeating myself.
Anyway, so I moved the gig to an ecumenical agricultural community called Wahat Asalem in Arabic, and translated into Hebrew, it's Nevis Shalom, so something about peace, where...
Muslims and Christians and Druze and atheists all live together in a community and all their children all go to the same school and they all mix together and they live peacefully and grow chickpeas mainly.
As an example to the rest of us, if you like.
So we did a gig there in the open air.
And it was huge.
60,000 Israelis came.
What I didn't realize at the time, of course, was, of course, they were all Israelis, because Palestinians aren't allowed to travel.
So there couldn't be any Palestinians there.
They would need special permission, you know, to cross through checkpoints and things, which they wouldn't get.
So we did this gig, and at the end of it, and it was lovely, they were extremely enthusiastic, they knew the work very well, and it was very...
And all of that.
And lovely food backstage, and it was a warm summer evening.
At the end of it, I thought, I'm going to say something.
It was euphoric at the end of the gig.
And I said, so I made a little speech, and I went, you are the generation of young Israelis who need to make peace with your neighbors, start talking to the Palestinian Authority, and the blah, blah, blah, and whatever.
Can you imagine you're going from Austin to Dallas and you can only go on the road if you're Christian?
If you're not a Christian, you can't go on the road.
So if you're an atheist or some other thing, you're not allowed to drive on the road.
You have to go on back roads and they're all filled up with boulders and there are checkpoints everywhere.
So the local indigenous people are not allowed to use the roads.
And you see that, and when you see it, you think, I don't believe this.
But you get to believe it as you drive around.
And all the checkpoints, and they have to go this way.
Only people with yellow license plates can go through here, which means that they're Jewish Israelis.
And it's mind-numbingly...
It fills you with despair when you think, how can this possibly be happening?
You know, it's 2007 or whenever it was.
How can this be happening in the world?
And nobody where I live knows about it.
Or if they do, they don't care.
How can they not care?
And I say, you might bring it up here and say, how would you feel if you weren't a Christian and that meant you couldn't use the road?
I mean, it's so weird that it's hard to get your mind around believing that that is the case, but it is.
And that is what is called apartheid.
And in those days you couldn't use the word apartheid in relation to Israel.
It was completely verboten in 2006. You could not use the word.
You would have been strung up in the press and everywhere else and accused of being a Holocaust denier and this and that and Hitler and whatever.
Now it's very difficult for anyone to have a conversation about Israel and Palestine without using the word apartheid because it is in the lexicon and the problem is far more in the light and we are looking at it more and there's more information for all of us about it than there was then.
It's the work that BDS has done and so it has made progress and I'm glad it has because what I desperately hope to live to see is a holy land, I don't care what it's called, from the River Jordan to the sea where the people all have equal religious and political and social rights, all of them equal.
And so that's what I work for in the movement.
And maybe we should talk about something else because if you wind me up, I might go on for hours.
For those reasons, for the fact that they're a different ethnic group.
So the South African model clearly applies, except that the South Africans who survived the South African model all say that the Israeli model is far worse than the white South African model was.
The white South Africans at least tried to build Well, they've poured money in for a start, trying to keep the black population quiet, which they failed to do.
But both Desmond Tutu, before he sadly died, and Mandela, obviously, as well, both came out completely and said, this is a lot worse than our conditions were in South Africa before apartheid.
That's why they label anyone who criticizes the apartheid policies of the state of Israel without criticizing the Jewish religion or any Jewish person.
I mean, the fact that a lot of the people who are in the government are of the Jewish faith means that they can somehow feel they can conflate criticism of the apartheid policies without With the general criticism of an anti-Semitic criticism of the Jewish people or people who...
Well, nice try, fellas, but it won't wash.
That's not what it is.
And most of us who get labelled as anti-Semites are not.
And like Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, the guy who was removed from the Labour Party in England on the grounds that he was accused of being anti-Semitic.
He's left-wing and he's pro-Palestinian, pro the idea that they should have human rights, the Palestinian people.
Who, after all, were the huge majority of the indigenous people in the Holy Land back in the start of the 20th century, before the start of the Zionist enterprise, which didn't really get going until 1920, although the idea...
The idea was happening in the late 19th century, in the 1880s and 1890s.
I can't remember the guy's name now, but he was a Russian who thought up the idea of a return to the promised land, as it's called.
Out of all the people that perform music and travel and are as prominent as you are, you're probably one of the most outspoken and informed when it comes to issues on foreign policy and human rights.
When did this become a big part of your life and when did discussing this publicly become a big part of your life?
Well, it became a big part of my life the day my father died, I think.
I mean, I wouldn't know because I was only five months old.
My father, as you might or may not know, died at Anzio on the 18th of February, 1944, and I was born September 1943, so I was only a few months old.
But when I started to understand some of this, Was when he didn't come home and start picking me up from school when I was a little kid.
And then, all through my childhood, I was brought up by my mother, my brother, and my big brother John and I were brought up single-handed by my mum, who was a schoolteacher, but she was also very left-wing.
She's an interesting woman because she came from a very kind of middle-class family in London.
Funnily enough, they lived in Golders Green, which was sort of well known for being a Jewish community in North London.
Her father ran a business that was sort of middleman in fancy goods, toys and things like that.
So there was a big warehouse in London.
But my mother went off to a boarding school, girls' school, so she was brought up in a fairly straight-laced, English, Christian, middle-class way.
She then trained as a teacher, and her first teacher training was in a town called Bradford, which is in the north of London.
Not north of London, north of England, far north of England, in Yorkshire.
And it was a huge eye-opener to her.
There she was.
The first winter comes along.
It's really cold.
There's a foot of snow on the floor.
And she suddenly notices that half the kids in her class are walking to school with no shoes.
And something went, bing!
This would have been in 1935, 1936, something like that.
And she suddenly went...
What?
And she started to look into social conditions there in the industrial north.
And even then, in the mid to late 30s, she understood that there were inequalities in the context of the society that she lived in that she felt a personal need to do something about.
And she became extremely left-wing.
Anyway...
Cut to later on.
So our front room was always a Labour Party committee room and she was always off in the evenings canvassing at elections and dragging me and my brother to British-China Friendship Association meetings in the evening.
But she was always very careful and clear with us that she would I remember one day she said to me and my brother, when we come back from a meeting, interestingly enough, at the Friends Meeting House, which is the place the Quakers meet, you know, wherever it is in the world.
It's always called the Friends Meeting House.
And we've been watching films of K-pop-clad Chinese, you know, soldiers fighting against Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist puppet government and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she said, you know where we've been tonight, don't you, Roger?
And I said, no.
And she said, we've been at the Friends Meeting House, that is where the Quakers meet.
She said, well, as you know, I'm an atheist, so I can't subscribe to their religious beliefs, but I will say this, they are very, very good people.
I can still recount that story now because it's so important.
You don't have to subscribe to people's beliefs.
I can be a radical atheist and you can be a Hindu.
The important thing is that we're good people.
That we have hearts and that we care about our brothers and sisters.
And my mum did.
I'm going to tell you one more mum story and then I'll stop about mum.
Because this is the most important bit.
I was 13 years old.
I had just gone through a phase where I suddenly realized I was going to die.
I don't know if all adolescents have this existential crisis in their early puberty.
But I did.
And I thought, F me.
I'm going to die.
This is scary as shit.
You know, oh my God.
And I was, it might have been that or it might have been something else.
But anyway, something was worrying me and it was probably more some kind of political thing that I'd latched onto, maybe through her.
And she looked at me and she said, all right, I'm going to give you some advice now.
Come on then, Mum.
All through your life, you're going to be faced with difficult questions and you're going to have to figure things out.
This is my advice.
When anything crops up, so it could be Israel, Palestine, it could be anything.
It doesn't matter what it is.
You must read, read, read, read, read.
That's what Smokonish was telling me.
He hadn't.
He'd only read one side.
That's the difference between Michael McConnish and me.
I've tried to look at all sides of these things, so I know a bit more what I'm doing.
Anyway, she said, read, read, read.
And, very important, learn everything you can about the subject that's troubling you.
And, importantly, look at it from both sides.
There's another opinion.
Make sure you study that as well.
It'll take some time.
It'll be hard work.
But when you've done that, the work is over.
You have done all the heavy lifting.
The rest of it is easy.
And I went, uh, what is the rest of it, Mum?
And she looked at me and she said, the rest of it?
Yeah, but what happens then, if we're sitting down the pub and I tell you that story and we've got all night, one of us will have another drink and then we might start talking about the philosophical implications Of how you decide what's the right thing to do.
Because some bloke listening to this wherever, it doesn't matter where they are, who's Zionist and who believes in the Zionist enterprise in Israel and in the occupied territory, in fact in the whole of the palace.
A promised land.
Let's call it the promised land.
It's dangerous to call it the promised land because then you start getting biblical.
Promised?
Who was it promised to?
Ah, it was promised to the Israelis, you know.
Whoa, sorry, I didn't mean the promised land.
I meant the Middle East.
What do you mean the Middle East?
That was made up by Sykes and Pico after the First World War, you know.
But you do get into the thing of, wow, now this really is a fascinating conversation.
The right thing to do?
Should we start talking about now and what's going on in the world now and what the right thing to do might be?
I mean, you said a few minutes ago that I've been a bit controversial, particularly recently.
And part of the controversy is about the Ukraine and what's the right thing to do.
All I've done about the Ukraine is to try to lend what little weight I have to put that tiny bit of power I have in my shoulder To the wheel of encouraging anybody I can get to listen to stop the war, including Putin.
I've written to Putin.
I wrote to Putin four or five days ago because people were saying, why don't you tell Putin?
Well, just hold on a minute.
If you want to join this conversation, you have to do a bit of research.
Well, you don't have to, obviously.
But you should.
You should.
It would be wise.
If you took my mother's advice, you would before you expressed an opinion about what's the right thing to do.
And also, when you're thinking about it, if you want my advice, you will constantly put yourselves in the position of that young Ukrainian man or woman on the front line and that young Russian man or woman in the front line and their parents and their uncles and aunts and their brothers And sisters and the misery and pain and the lack of anything good at the end.
And the more it escalates, the more we send arms, the more Putin...
The only thing that they can do is start to talk to one another, just like JFK and Nikita Khrushchev did in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Which was kept secret for years and years afterwards because JFK didn't want to look like a wimp.
He didn't want to look as if he'd look, but he did.
He and Nikita Khrushchev spoke on the telephone often.
And at the end of it, they did a quid pro quo deal where JFK said, I'll take all our medium-range missiles out of Turkey and wherever else it was.
Turkey was the main one.
If you take your missiles out of Cuba.
So they put their hands across the ocean and shook hands and that was the end of it.
And they did it.
And they kept their word.
They kept their word to that bargain.
And that led on to the later conversations between Reagan and Gorbachev and the non-proliferation treaties and all the other things that made our planet a little bit safer from the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.
Not safe, but a little bit.
Until now.
And now, By the second it gets more and more and more and more dangerous as this thing is allowed to escalate.
So I'm making my position entirely.
All I'm interested in is a ceasefire and for talks to begin.
I'll tell you one thing I said before I pull it up, because it'll take a minute, was that I said some friends of mine, because I have a guitar-playing friend in England who wrote to me, why are you trying to suggest peace and a ceasefire?
This man has to be, he's a monster.
He's going to invade Poland and then he'll invade the rest of Europe.
And then, and unless we stand up to him now, we're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, and all of that.
So one of the things I said to Putin, a friend of mine thinks that you're going to invite Poland and the other Baltic states and that you're then going to influence on Europe and blah, blah, blah.
If that's true, please tell us now so we can all just say, all right, and blow ourselves to smithereens because that's what's going to happen if you do that.
For sure.
For absolutely sure.
You cannot.
If you do that, you will start World War III. We know that the Ukraine situation is complicated and it's been 20 years in the making and it's...
And we discussed this very thing and we discussed the United States when they orchestrated a coup in Ukraine and how NATO has been moving their weapons closer and closer to the Russian line.
And they've been saying all along you're breaking the agreement that was made between Baker, who was Secretary of State in 1990, and Gorbachev, where Gorbachev said, okay, I will agree to the reunification of Germany so long as NATO doesn't move one inch closer to the Russian border than the eastern borders of Germany.
I think what was very important in the conversation that you had with CNN is not that Russia is good and that, you know, we should support Russia.
There was none of that.
What you were essentially saying was that we have to be honest about what the United States has done.
And that narrative is never discussed.
When he was talking about the dangers of China and you brought up the fact that China hasn't invaded anyone in over a hundred years.
Like, how can you say that when you know about all the interventionalist foreign policy decisions that the United States has made overseas, and then you look at what China's done?
They should be allowed to do business with whoever they want.
I believe in the idea of what's called free trade up to that point.
There has to be a fair crack of the whip of everybody.
And by and large, when multinational corporations want to invest in underdeveloped countries, they want to do it on their terms.
And they don't want the people who live there to get anything out of it.
I mean, I've been involved in a court battle for at least 10 years now with Chevron.
Because of the pollution that they caused in the Amazon, in northeast Ecuador, with a friend of mine called Steve Donziger, who was sent to prison for acting on behalf of these people.
Obviously, the right thing to do if you were the law in the United States would be to look at the facts of the matter and come to the conclusion that Chevron should give the $9.5 billion to the people whose lives they've destroyed making money or Texaco was the company who actually did it.
But, things being what they are, that's not the way the law works.
The law operates to support whoever can afford it, actually, which in this case is Chevron.
They still haven't paid a penny, and they're still fighting, and they will go on fighting.
And speaking as somebody who's supporting the other side, who doesn't have bottomless pockets, it's hard.
It's hard to find the amount of money that they spend on it.
Because they're worried of a domino effect, that if they lose this case, then they're going to lose the case in Nigeria, and they're going to lose the case in Australia, and suddenly they can see the whole pack of cards beginning to collapse.
Well, it should collapse.
Pay up.
You've made enough profits out of the indigenous people all over the world.
But I did a gig a few weeks ago in D.C. and played to, I don't know, 16,000 people or something.
And the next day I dragged myself out of bed and pushed over to the steps of the DOG. Knowing full well what I would find, which is my friend Randy Craglico and a van with a sign on it, and about 40 of the same activists I've seen at every gathering in support of Stephen Donziger and his freedom for the last 10 years.
So, dear President Putin, since the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February the 24th this year, I've tried to use my small influence to encourage a ceasefire and a diplomatic settlement that addresses the security needs of both Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
In that endeavor, I've written two open letters to Mrs. Elena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian president.
I can give you those letters as well.
These letters are readily available on the internet.
I'm increasingly asked to write to you, too.
So here goes.
First, would you like to see an end to this war?
If you were to reply and say, yes, please, that would immediately make things a lot easier.
He made a long speech with the accession speech of Donetsk and Lugansk and Kirshan and the other people.
Bit of Ukraine that they had the referendum and people said, can we be part of Russia, please?
Anyway, that's what that's about.
So, if you were to come out and say, oh yeah, if you were to come out and say, also the Russian Federation has no further territorial interest beyond the security of the Russian-speaking populations of the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, that would help too.
I say this because I know some people who think you want to overrun the whole of Europe, starting with Poland and the rest of the Baltic states.
If you do, fuck you.
And we might as well all stop playing the desperately dangerous game of nuclear chicken that the hawks on both sides of the Atlantic seem so comfortable with and have at it.
Yep, just blow each other and the world to smithereens.
The problem is I have kids and grandkids and so do most of my brothers and sisters all over the world.
And none of us would relish that outcome.
So please, Mr. Putin, indulge me and make us that assurance.
That he hasn't done yet.
But I have no doubt that...
It's part and parcel of what he is now saying publicly.
All right, back to the table.
If I've read your previous speeches correctly, would you like to negotiate a state of neutrality for a sovereign neighboring Ukraine?
Is that correct?
Assuming such a peace could be negotiated, it would have to include an absolute binding agreement not to invade anyone ever again.
Full stop.
I know, I know, the USA and NATO invade other sovereign nations at the drop of a hat or for a few barrels of oil, but that doesn't mean you should.
Your invasion of Ukraine took me completely by surprise.
It was a heinous war of aggression, provoked or not.
When Mrs. Zelenska replied to me via Twitter, I was very surprised.
And mightily moved.
If you were to reply to me, I would mightily respect you for it and take it as an honorable move in the right direction towards a sustainable peace.
Well, you're going to have to look up his succession speech because I'm not going to start trying to quote Putin in translation without some words in front of me because I could get it wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah.
He said one thing that could be seen as combative, which I can remember, he said.
He said, I want to come to the table.
I want to cease fire.
I want to negotiate peace, not dictate peace, negotiate peace.
With the Ukraine, with Zelenska, he said, but the will of the people in the Donetsk, Lubansk, Kirshen, and whatever the one is whose name I can't remember, is inviolate.
That is not up for discussion.
Zelenska, in response, said...
I will not negotiate with Russia until Putin has been removed.
There's nothing unites people more than an existential attack upon what they consider to be their sovereignty.
And let us not forget, anybody who would like to join this conversation with me or John Mearsheimer or any of the other people who are pro-peace and pro-diplomacy and pro-negotiations and pro-learning to get on with all our brothers and sisters in Russia who are very good people.
As my mother would say, my mother used to say that about the Americans, because she came here for two years on an exchange when she was a student, and she spent the summer near Akron in Ohio at a Girl Scout camp, and then she spent another few months in Texas.
So that was her thing.
And I'll never forget, she used to say to me, you know, Roger, the Americans...
They're really very interesting people.
He said, they're very good people.
They're very good-hearted people.
They look after you.
They're very, very hospitable and very, very good in that way.
Here, in America, there is at heart a people just and true, open, sometimes to the point of ridicule.
Good neighbours to rebuild the barn, the doctor's note of Western legend carried forth beyond the grave.
I knew your pa, enough.
In caucuses across the land, deliberate they'll always stand, defenders of the Rosenbergs, symbolic of that yearning to be better than before.
They never will give up their brother to the grocer's cold machine, belt welts livid from the strong arm of the law.
On campuses, in boardrooms, over giving thanks and pumpkin pie, on hustings in committee rooms, whenever tyrants loomed, we always held in our esteem the ones who hold on to the dream, unflinching while the bullies pose and fiddle on the hill.
Has commerce so reduced the free that, blinded like a tot, contaminated by the dogshit in the grass, we blunder, slaves to humbug and this Texan dynasty?
No.
Beyond the grip of trade, the young strain beautiful and proud, the hoar-frost breath of new blood needs but nudges from the old forgotten guard to scale the moral high grounds in the clouds.
It makes me almost emotional to read that because I wrote that 18 years ago now.
But the idea of a younger generation coming up and saying, enough with this bullshit.
That people just sort of lose interest in it, except for the very few that are very driven and very disciplined and really do spend the time to look at things.
And those people ultimately usually wind up becoming activists or very involved at least.
And many of them cling to their activism till their dying day.
Like me, for instance.
But I know so many.
And there are men and women that You just want to hug, you just want to go, oh my god, you're such a, you're so dogged, but also brave, and you've got such a big heart that you care about people enough to make a fuss.
I don't know if you noticed, because I sent you a stick of my show, but before we do the song Sheep, the last thing, it says, Orwell was right to warn us in Brave New World in 1984, and Aldous Huxley was right to warn us of the coming dystopia in, yeah, no, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was right to warn us in his military industrial speech.
Yeah, there's no question that visually and sonically it's impressive and also I use my almost, that's not my whole body of work, but a small bit of things that go back to the beginning of when I started writing songs and things.
So we play about half of Dark Side of the Moon and blah, blah, blah.
Of course, all the stuff from Dark Southern, it was all about the same stuff that I'm banging on about now.
So it's all kind of, it's all very relevant.
But I'm very interested in what you said.
I'd like to pursue that because you're so right about that.
So the only reason why people would get involved in politics without money is to try to make the world a better place.
And I think you would recruit more people that have good intentions, and you would make it less attractive to people that are just looking to make money.
I mean, you look at what's going on, like Nancy Pelosi just shot down this thing where it bans Congress from trading in stocks.
She shot down something to ban insider trading.
Well, there's only one reason to do that, because you want to keep making money insider trading.
You're talking about a woman who's on the last days of her life, who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, I don't care who they are, the hugely rich American oligarchs, I'm sure it's true of Russian oligarchs and Chinese oligarchs, they amass the huge amounts of money because it gives them power.
Then they buy newspapers and television stations and whatever, so they become part of the system of propaganda to keep us all in line.
And I actually wrote a sketch about...
I know you're in comedy.
I wrote a sketch about Zuckerberg.
Unfortunately, it's not in the show.
But I'll tell you what it was, because it's unlikely that it'll get into the show now.
And I was writing it about being down here.
The show originally, when I wrote it, was about them up there in the cloud.
And I actually had a city on a cloud floating about.
It's gone now.
It's now a penthouse.
So it's attached to it in the show.
And I write about them up there, the oligarchs up there.
Yeah, and he's now in cahoots with the FBI and the CIA and has some cozy meetings with them deciding who to allow to communicate with their brothers and sisters and who to censor.
Well, the fascinating part of that is that it's not true, right?
That's the fascinating part.
The fascinating part is that there wasn't Russian disinformation in regards to that laptop.
That's not what was going on.
It was an actual real laptop from a man who is, at the time, the vice president's son, who had a serious drug problem and was kind of off the rails.
And he left this laptop at a repair station, and it turned out inside that laptop was a bunch of crazy shit.
And it's real.
And they were saying that this was Russian disinformation, which would be the most wildlessly slanderous thing, wildly slanderous thing that Russia has ever done.
Like create a laptop and fill it with the son of the vice president, like pornography and bribery and all this crazy shit that's supposedly in that laptop.
So the FBI contacts I don't believe he specifically said that that laptop was a part of it, but they certainly were insinuating that.
And then they decided to limit the engagement that people had with that.
That's very vague.
I don't know what he was saying when he said that.
My perspective was, now imagine if you are him and you're running something like Facebook.
You are, first of all, you're insanely busy.
And if you have trust and faith in the FBI and the intelligence agencies, you definitely don't want to be distributing disinformation from a foreign company.
Or a foreign country that's trying to undermine our election.
So what do you do?
Well, he didn't censor it the way Twitter did, which I think is pretty egregious.
But what he did do is limit its engagement.
I don't know what that means.
The problem with that term, like limiting the engagement, like how are you doing that?
What does that mean?
Can you tell me what you do?
And they don't.
They don't tell you what's involved in whatever, at least, limited engagement protocol they have.
Whether it's censorship, or I don't know what you want to call it, because you could put that story on your page.
It would just limit the amount of people who see it.
But I don't understand how you're doing that.
And I don't think they want to reveal that either.
But certainly anything to do with foreign – for instance, anything to do with the Ukraine war, you can't have Meta deciding what we should believe about that.
It's bad enough that the whole of the print section of mainstream media and all television has decided what we should believe about the Ukraine.
So they're all completely happy – To tell us that Russian soldiers have been raping babies to death.
And then three days later, you find out that it's unattributable.
And where did that story come from?
And it came from some nebulous site somewhere in the Ukraine.
But nevertheless, it's already been printed and it goes somewhere into the consciousness.
You build up this thing of...
We can really hate these people enough so that people are now saying, we should just kill them all now.
I wonder how many people say things like that just to get attention and likes and just to get views because I think that's a big part of what Twitter is.
I'm sure there's a lot of look at me involved in a lot of these posts that go out.
And also a lot of...
What will people think of me?
Which is the whole, if you think about it, all of this, if it all developed from the beginnings of Facebook and for whatever that site was that Zuckerberg started with, grading co-eds, that's sort of the beginning of it and the FOMO and the this and that and sending pictures of yourself to your friends and caring what your schoolmates think about and all of that and it blowing up into something that is far,
far, far More important than your mother telling you, read as much as you can, get educated, make sure you know what you're talking about, and do the right thing.
But what I tried to get from him and what I wanted to try to understand is like, what is it like when you create something that literally is just a social network?
You're just supposed to be socializing with people and sharing photographs, which is pretty innocuous.
And then it becomes something that can influence elections and foreign policy and the way the world is viewed and the way narratives are spun.
And, you know, it's a daunting task, and especially when you didn't set out to do that in the beginning.
Nor did Twitter.
Twitter set out to just be something where you just post, oh, I'm going to the movies today.
And then it became what it is now because people realize, well, this is a tool to distribute information.
And you can just put up anything.
And now...
Should we just limit that information?
And that's what they've decided to do.
They've decided to take this moral and ethical position and impose their own ideas on what should or should not be said.
But all based at some point on their position that they want to go on getting richer and richer and richer and they want Meta to be the biggest company in the world and to own everything else and then they really will rule the world.
Funnily enough, there's groups of Chevron shareholders who are going to the AGM now and telling them to pay the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador the money they owe them because they don't sleep at night.
I've never been to Davos and I never will because the World Economic Forum seems to me to be a can of worms that I don't want to get within a hundred miles.
If it was a movie, you would go, well, that's too over the top.
There's no way there's a guy with a German accent that's telling the world how to live, and they get all the billionaires to come and meet with him and decide what to do with the future of food and healthcare.
And people will want to hang me for it because it doesn't...
Well, you can make up your own mind because you might think it's brilliant.
And people do sometimes write to me and say, why are you such an arsehole?
Why aren't you more like Bono?
So here I am.
I am going through an FBO. So I've just got off a private plane in Zurich.
And suddenly there's Bono and he sidles up to me and whatever.
And that grin he's got.
And it starts sort of trying to make small talk.
And I know very well what he's doing there.
He's going to Davos.
He's flown in for Davos.
So that's why he's there for Davos.
But what I didn't tell him...
And this is going to sound like boasting and it is.
The reason I'm there is because I've just been to northern Iraq and been across to northeastern Syria and picked up two kids from Trinidad with their mother and flown them to Zurich and then we're flying them back to Trinidad because their father joined ISIS and stole the children and took them there and then obviously he was killed.
And my friend Clive Stafford-Smith said, what are we going to do about these two kids in Camp Roche in northern Syria?
And it was one Christmas.
And it was 2019, I think.
And I thought, what am I going to do?
Am I going to go and sit by a roaring fire, you know, in Switzerland?
And occasionally go skiing?
Or am I going to go to Syria and try and rescue these kids?
So we went to Syria.
But I thought it was...
I thought it was a really interesting meeting because I've never understood his whole thing of, you know, George W. Bush is a good bloke.
I go and visit him on his ranch in Texas.
He killed a million people, not on his own.
Obviously, the rest of the neocons were with it.
Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and, you know, Bill Kristol and all the rest of them.
They were all in it.
And Tony Blair, let's not forget.
They were all in it together.
They all did it together.
They all knew it was a lie.
They all knew it was nonsense.
They all knew they were doing it to steal oil or whatever they were doing it for.
But it certainly had nothing to do with 9-11 and it had nothing to do.
And so obviously I still boil with rage.
You can't ignore a hundred million dead.
You can't.
You just can't go, oh, well, that was 17 years ago.
Forget about it.
Forget about it.
You know, you can't.
Well, I can't.
But obviously Bono can.
I assume.
Otherwise, why is he going to visit George Bush?
Anyway, I know that I probably shouldn't have told you that story or said any of that stuff.
I think, I mean, if you really wanted to find out what a person like that is like, that would be an incentive to go visit George Bush to find out like whether or not that does hang on his conscience.
Yeah, they're weird and it's like, I mean obviously I'm armchair psychologist here, but I'm looking into him like that's a man that's very troubled.
That's a man that, I mean, the weight of the world and the deaths that were caused by the decisions that he made as a president and the amount of American lives that were lost, the amount of Iraqi lives that were lost, the way the world has changed.
The way the world thinks of America post 9-11 is so different.
There was a window of time right after the attacks on the World Trade Center where the whole world was united with America.
And that was squandered for money.
That was squandered.
That was squandered when we invaded Iraq.
That was squandered when people had this Real, true understanding of what the motivations really were and the fact there weren't really weapons of mass destruction and that we saw the devastation and the lost lives and the way the world looks at us is incredibly different.
From September 11, 2001 to today, it's just a complete polar shift.
And the interesting thing as well is that on February, I believe it was Valentine's Day or the 15th or something, there were over 20 million people all over the world in the streets.
Saying there are no weapons of mass destruction.
What are you thinking about?
This is insane.
Hans Blix has already told you there's nothing there.
They've hunted and hunted and hunted.
Colin Powell stood up and lied in the United Nations, knowing full well that he was lying.
He must have had access to all the information.
They all knew and whatever.
And yet, you know, and yet you're going to do this thing.
My theory would be, if you go and see George Bush, he's still alive, is he?
Well, my theory would be that he never escaped from the dynasty, you know, from his genes, whatever, from that family because it's a supremely toxic background to come out of.
All that bullshit about getting rid of the Vietnam Syndrome.
That's why Desert Storm, or whatever the first one was called, happened.
All of that history is fascinating reading, but it's also It's completely insane.
And this is where, during my show, I touch on this occasion, because in my show, as well as you will see tomorrow night, I sing two bits of a new song called The Bar.
And I make absolutely certain that the audience understand what the song is about.
It's about this place that I carry around inside me.
And I said, we all have it, if we can find it in us, in our hearts or in our soul.
And it's a place where we can converse with others and share opinions.
Do this.
Have a conversation about things and share our feelings.
Okay?
And even if we're lucky enough, share our love with other human beings in the world in a place that's safe.
And I call that place the bar.
Okay?
Why am I telling you this?
I tell you what I'm telling you, because what I've discovered doing these shows, and I've done about 30 of them or a few more in the United States, is that people get it.
The audience gets it.
You can see them getting it.
And in a way, what is good about it is that singing those three verses that I do of that song, it gives them permission to disagree with me and yet not feel they have to stand up and wave their fists and walk out.
Because they've understood what I'm saying.
It's alright to disagree about things and have different opinions about it, but we have to allow one another to express our opinions.
And it may be that we'll meet somebody who understands more about things.
You know, if you meet the Dalai Lama, you're going to learn something from them.
I'm not saying I'm the Dalai Lama, but there are things we can learn from other human beings without going on Facebook or picking up our phone and whatever.
No, you are making sense, but I think that's one of the great things about your show is that you combine this amazing music that has this incredible history to it with All of these messages and with all of these visuals.
I think you got a lot of attention during the Trump administration because of the flying Trump pigs and all the other visuals that you did.
People loved it.
But then when you put up a photograph of Biden and said he was a war criminal, then people were like, wait a minute.
Yeah, well, let's see what happens, shall we, before we come to a final conclusion about Biden.
As I said in the Shmokonish interview, I said there's something criminal.
It is criminal not to be trying to end the war in Ukraine, but just by trying to pour weapons into it, just pouring weapons into the Ukraine.
Ukrainian people can't beat Russia in a war on the ground, however many weapons you give them.
They're just cannon fodder.
That policy shows that Joe Biden and Antony Blinken and the administration and whoever is pulling their strings to go all conspiracy theory for a minute couldn't give an F about the Ukrainian people.
They couldn't care less how many of them.
They've said so.
I saw, what's his name?
Not McConnell.
Lindsey Graham.
I saw him in an interview the other night going, we are going to help the Ukrainians fight to the death.
So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?
He said, no, no.
He says, there's nothing new that way.
They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense's office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
There's a lyric in another new song of mine, one of the other songs I wrote in lockdown that talks about I'd say in Timbuktu or in the Republic of the Congo and other states where something's...
I can't remember.
I'd have to look it up.
But it's saying for the old slave trade to merge seamlessly with the new.
So I'm making that point that this foreign policy is reintroducing...
Slavery to the world.
Reintroducing the slave trade in Africa.
North Africa, West Africa, and the Middle East.
That's what it's doing.
And people seem to think it's alright, but what's it for?
What is it?
I've written another letter to somebody, which I haven't posted yet.
Oh, I know, it's to a councillor in the Ukraine who has declared me persona non grata in Krakow, which is a big town very near the Polish-Ukrainian border, because he claims I'm a Putin apologist.
And so all my asking everybody that I can get to listen to me to make peace, to stop the war, to start negotiation or whatever, for them I'm a...
All they want to do is kill every Russian that they can get their hands on.
I never sit down like, you know, professional writers, sometimes they say, I get up at 6 every morning, have a cup of coffee and a piece of bacon, and then I go to my room and I write until 12, 30. Right.
And then I have a bottle of champagne and pass out in line.
I'm going to talk to you just for a second about prose.
Yeah.
I told this to Chris Hedges the other day, but I'm going to tell it to you as well, because that's what's jogged my memory.
You know that thing when you're reading a book, okay, and you've got it on your bedside table or whatever, and you read it, or any time, you could be lying on the beach, and it's a great book.
It's a really great book.
And you get to about 10 pages from the end and you find yourself putting it down quicker because you don't want it to finish.
I do this anyway.
And a lot of people who read, I think, will know this experience.
So you keep putting it down because you don't want it to finish.
Well, I wrote a poem about my experience with Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.
I don't know if you've read that novel, but if you haven't, you should.
It's a fantastic book.
And I was feeling like that about it.
So I wrote a poem and I sent it to him.
He never replied, but that's fine.
I wasn't really expecting a play.
And it's just called On First Reading All the Pretty Horses.
And I'll try and remember it.
There is a magic in some books that sucks a man into connections with the spirits hard to touch that join him to his kind.
A man will eke the reading out, guarded like a canteen in the desert heat, but sometimes needs must drink and then And then the final drop falls sweet.
The last page turns.
The end.
I know I've fucked it up because I forgot that last one.
No, because I was in lockdown, so I was in the same household every day.
If I wasn't sort of doing anything else, which most of the time I wasn't, I'd go...
Where was I? I'd just pull the laptop over and write another chapter about something different or leaving all the Pink Floyd stuff to last, obviously, for obvious reasons.
Hard things to write about stuff, so you just leave it alone for a bit.
Well, I'm not very interested in most popular music.
I mean, there are certain people that I'm great fans of that mainly the sort of...
the writers, the singer-songwriters, you know, like...
So Dylan and...
Neil Young, but I won't start a long list because I probably could, but it's that end of the spectrum that I'm more interested in.
I'm not really interested in loud rock and roll, which some people are and they love it, but I couldn't care less about ACDC or Eddie Van Halen or any of that stuff.
So I sing a song unashamedly about nuclear war at the end of the show when everybody's just watched the second half of Dark Side of the Moon and they're all, you know, really happy.
And quite rightly, because my band is really good and so everybody's very moved.
I take the risk of saying, you know, there's something that is a lot more important than any of this.
We are teetering on the edge of annihilation.
And they've arrived at a point in the show then where they go...
But they also go, let's listen to what he has to say.
And some of them even know the song, which is from the final cut, which was the last record I made in 1983 with Pink Floyd.
And then we do it, and a lot of the audience respond.
They want to show me that they understand and that they care, and they stand up, and that when everybody's being blown to bits and it's the end of the world in the song, and it's visual as well, it's a beautiful animation that Sean Evans has made, who's my collaborator in all things visual in these shows.
And the people sort of get it, but still it's pretty sombre because there's nothing really rah-rah or rock and roll about nuclear war.
And when I say, you know, if you run into Joe Biden in the street, you might just tap him on the shoulder and say, hey, Joe, shouldn't we get rid of nuclear weapons?
Why not spend our time?
Let's talk to Putin about that and also China.
All the nuclear power.
Why don't we all get together and say, listen, these are too dangerous.
Can we all agree now?
We've had them since 1945 and they've done nobody any good.
Can't we just get rid of them so we don't have to worry about them anymore?
All it requires is the will of the people to persuade.
But again, it's like you.
You can't do it until you can separate, until you get rid of Citizens United.
You can't do it until you take money out of politics.
Right.
You certainly can't do it over here in the United States, whether they could do it in Russia or, you know, Russia's an autocratic state, so who knew?
When people bring up, yeah, Russia and or China with me, you know, I say, you're talking to the wrong bloke.
I don't speak Russian.
I don't speak Chinese.
I've never lived there.
I know a little bit about the United States and about the United Kingdom and less, but a little bit about, I speak Greek, so I know a bit about Greece and And, you know, we learned French when I was at school, and there are neighbors who we hate across La Manche.
But I can't, without speaking Russian and Mandarin, How can you possibly know what's going on?
That's why it's no surprise that Chomsky, you know, his work in linguistics was the thing that brought him to the notice of other academics and intellectuals back in the 50s.
But...
And he's right because, you know, linguistics has always been hugely important.
Linguistics is the basis of all philosophy and unless you speak the language that the philosophy is being described in, you can't begin to take part in the conversation.
It may be that if you do what they say, but it has nothing to do with us, any of us.
Nothing to do with anyone in Pink Floyd or anyone who wrote or recorded any of the music.
It's something that somebody thinks.
So it's a coincidence of some time and maybe it's cosmic coincidence.
I do like the story though of the cop in Louisiana following a bus and it was weaving about the road a bit.
And so he pulls it over, young motorcycle cop, puts the bike up on the stand, opens the door, nearly falls over, there's so much smoke coming out through the bloody door.
He goes in, it goes through, and he's trying to find people, you know, with dope, because it's...
Just full of marijuana smoke.
Eventually he gets to the back of the bus where there's a private compartment and he opens the door and goes in and there's Willie Nelson.
And the story is that Willie Nelson is listening to Dark Side of the Moon and watching The Wizard of Oz on the TV. And I don't believe it for a minute, but I like the story.
It's like I actually mentioned one of the periods, one of the moments is in the show because it's in when we play Wish You Were Here and I do wish he was here and I mean it's partly what that song's about and Shine On You Crazy Diamond is just completely about Sid.
But we were, I tell the story in text in the show and it goes, we'd been to a meeting at the Capitol Tower in Los Angeles and Sid and I were walking down the street after it and we stopped at the traffic light at Hollywood and Vine, Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles and he looked at me and smiled and he said, it's nice here in Las Vegas, isn't it?
Well, we were in LA, so he already had no idea where he was, even like that.
But then he, I say in the thing, you'll see at the show it says, then his face darkened, and he looked down at the ground and spat out one word, people.
And I was saying, does it make any sense, you know, to go and visit?
She said, no, don't do that.
And she told me, I said, why not?
And she said, well...
He gets very agitated and upset if he's reminded of what happened before whatever this is.
He doesn't like it.
He doesn't want to see people from his past.
He'd rather be left alone.
And he used to paint a little bit and live just on his own in Cambridge until he died when he was 60. Wow.
So, I don't know what else to say about it really.
It was tragic, obviously.
But those of us who were in Pink Floyd at the time experienced it as an existential threat as well.
Like me, what are we going to do?
He writes the bloody songs.
Well, I wrote about 20% of them before, but they were nothing.
Sid's songs were the things that were different.
They had that weird English romanticism about them.
You know, they were beautiful.
I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like.
It's got a basket, a bell that rings and things that make it look good.
I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.
That's so quirky in terms of its meter, the way the lyric attaches both to the melody and to the time signature and the tempo of the thing is remarkable.
And it wasn't just, you know, there were lots of quirky little songs like that, all in a very English romantic tradition and whatever.
So how could we possibly survive?
If the guy who writes the songs in the band goes crazy, you're fucked, basically.
Well, it all comes back to my mum, really, because we made, in 1970, we made a record called Medal.
And on one side of it is a very long track called Echoes.
That is sort of me thinking a bit more metaphysically about our trip, you know, as humans from ancient times overhead the albatross.
It was all a bit kind of romantic and science fiction.
It was a bit Marvel comic-y.
You know, it had kind of attachments to Doctor Strange.
No Doctor Strange mentioning the lyrics.
I mentioned Doctor Strange in other songs that I was writing at the time.
But it has one verse in it that defines everything I've done since.
And the verse is this.
It goes...
Two strangers passing in the street, by chance two passing glances meet, and I am you, and what I see is me.
And will we something, will they call us to move on and whatever, but that's the important couplet, is to recognize your connection with your brother or sister, whoever they are, wherever they are.
So to say, to make that attachment and to make a declaration that we're all in this together.
So that's why I sing songs about the potential descent into a nuclear holocaust.
To my audiences in, well, tomorrow, Austin, Texas.
It's just me saying, I see you.
And that's what the bar is all about as well.
That's what the vulnerability is.
It's saying, I recognize that we're all African.
When you say that to a crowded room of Italian journalists, they all look at each other.
And one of the beautiful things about art, and particularly music, is that you can get a message like that across, and because people love the music and they'll listen to it over and over again and they'll remember your concert, it'll resonate.
It becomes a part of the way you think.
It enhances the way people think.
And that idea, like a positive mind virus, will grow in your head.
Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died.
So that's like, that's another version of The Bravery Being Out of Range, which I wrote in 1990. So I wrote, 1990, I wrote The Bravery Being Out of Range.
So that's 20 years after I wrote Us and Them.
And Us and Them is only about two strangers passing in the street, because there is no Us and Them.
It's all us.
But the people with the money, who by the elections that you were describing in the Citizens United conversation, they own all the newspapers and the TV state, and they would have us believe that the Us and Them is real and that we are good and they are evil.
I don't know why, but I saw a picture of Dirk Bogard the other day because...
Oh, I know.
Do I know?
I was watching a documentary about Buster Keaton.
How did Dirk Bogard get into that?
Or maybe it wasn't.
Maybe that was another thing.
But I couldn't look at Dirk.
I was thinking how unbelievably handsome and elegant Dirk Bogard is, sitting there with his knee crossed over like that, you know, with a cigarette and whatever.
Well, at the opening of Death in Venice, he's sitting in a deck chair on the Lido.
And it's Mahler's Fourth Symphony, or is it his fifth?
Fourth, I think it's the adagiato from Mahler's Fourth Symphony.
And it's just like, you just go, when you hear that music with those shots, him on the Lido and there's a boat going across the Grand Canal or something like that, you just go...
So I find classical music often more moving than almost any of the pop music that I'm attached to.
But if it's popular music, for me anyway, it's more likely to be Billie Holiday than anything contemporary.
I was reading about God Bless the Child and I read for the first time the story about her because she wrote the lyrics to God Bless the Child and it's a true story.
Billie Holiday goes to borrow money from her mother Who won't give her any, because she's skint.
I was talking about Neil Young earlier, you know, how I lost my friends.
I still don't understand.
They got lost in something stations that became Polk, Bench Mutations, and they were waiting and waiting.
Which is an absolute direct, but me, I just headed north to where the pavement reads the road and all that stuff.
Narrative songs like that.
But there's also a lot of stuff that is open absolutely to interpretation.
One of my songs that I like to hear people talking about, or don't, but I would notice, is like...
The second verse of Wish You Were Here goes, did they get you to trade?
Your heroes for ghosts, hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change, and did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
Well, there's so many ideas all wrapped up in those words.
I know what they mean for me, but a lot of people sometimes either misinterpret or they interpret them in ways that mean something to them, I think.
It's funny that, hey teacher, leave them kids alone, which is now being taken up in Iran in all the protests in the streets because of the beating to death of, what's her name?
It's a tricky situation because obviously I'm against the idea of a theocracy under any terms.
Just as much of the Iranian mullahs, the ayatollah, as I am against the Israeli state, which is another theocracy and whatever.
But I'm also very wary of, and not that it hasn't stopped me making videos and sending my support to the protesters and saying, because it's separate from the politics of the thing.
Because there's a lot of talk that is encouraging the destruction of Iran in the right wing of politics in the United States.
What Wesley Clark was talking about on that.
Because they are on the list.
They're on the list of countries that need to be destroyed.
And obviously.
Anyway, what am I trying to say?
So I had to make the decision when friends in Iran said to me, look, they've just done this.
So I started making videos immediately.
So of course, hey, Ayatollah, leave them kids alone has become a big catchphrase in Iran.
And they're using it.
And it was, you know, it started off, I was, all my work was banned in apartheid South Africa because the kids in the townships were singing, leave those kids alive.
It would be nice to see, to allow a bit more leeway, particularly say in Latin America, to the new Colombian administration or the new president of Chile or the whatever, if we leave them alone and let them get on with it.
Whether or not they might develop societies where they don't feel that they need the heel of the jackboot to maintain control of her.
So it's hard to know because we, the West, the UK and the United States and the rest of NATO have interfered mightily In experiments in other ways to address social responsibility of governments in other economic models, say, like in Venezuela or in Chile or places where we attempt to depose the duly elected democratic government of the country.
Isn't it almost ironic that the one country that was founded within the last few hundred years to escape from the control of a dictatorship became the country that intervenes in more countries' government than any?
It gets ignored that the United States of America has interfered in more elections and have been involved in more coups and invaded more countries and deposed more democratically elected.
Not least the government of the Ukraine in 2014. And it's like none of it ever happened, you'd think.
We just have so much momentum in this country for the dissemination of propaganda that to like put a halt to that and start objectively analyzing the United States role and all these foreign conflicts and where money has played a part and what are the motivating factors for us to get involved in this and who stands to profit and what are the forces behind this?
To expect that from Mainstream media at this point, they're almost like, well, that's just not what we do.
Well, the unfortunate thing is, and without wishing to decry all journalists everywhere, but most of them in the mainstream media, the problem is that if you speak up against the story that they're selling on behalf of the ruling class, you get fired.
Yeah, we were having a conversation and I was talking to him about something where there is a narrative...
Yeah, I will.
I'll just say this one.
Okay, and it's...
It's about Syria, and it's about false flag, and it's about chemical weapons, and it's about Duma, and it's about April the 13th, and it's about the OPCW, and it's about the inspectors, Ian Henderson and Inspector B, and it's about the whole narrative, and about how it was taken eventually to the Security Council by Aaron Marte from Grey's own and others, and blah, blah, blah.
So there are two narratives.
One is the Sad Ghastis people, which is the officially accepted narrative.
And the other is that he didn't.
It was a false flag by al-Nusra and al-Qaeda who were in Duma, in control of the place on the day it happened, but left the next day because they'd already given up.
And the Assad government actually sent the buses to take them all away, saying, let's not fight in the streets.
You've lost.
You can go.
Anyway, so this kid started accusing me because...
I've done so much reading and research into this particular subject and I've been in a lot of trouble since 2018 because I stood up on stage in Barcelona and expressed my misgivings only because the United States and the UK and the Republic of France were about to go and bomb Syria in reprisal for a chemical weapons attack that there was a huge amount of Why
am I telling you this?
Oh, because he just shouted me down in the conversation.
The thing is that, you know, oh, and he claims to run something called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Oh, really?
And you buy this story of the Duma chemical as if it was absolutely the truth and you know it.
How do you know?
Oh, I know people in...
There's smacks of Bellingcat and Elliot Higgins and all of that stuff and the intermingling of the security services both in England and probably in Russia and God knows where else.
You can't believe anything.
You really do have to read everything, and you have to read the small print, and you have to look in if you want to know the truth about things that happen.
Well, you have to read everything, and particularly you have to read the documents that are leaked by whistleblowers.
There were new documents as late as 2020 from the OPCW from a further person who came out and said, I'm going to give you these documents now because they show that what you're saying is true and they show that Ian Henderson's misgivings about the official OPCW document...
Which was an absolute made-up job.
The guy who runs the OBCW now is called Arias, okay?
And they produced a final report on Duma that said it is likely that these people died of chlorine poisoning from a canister drop from a helicopter or whatever.
None of the evidence points to that.
It all points to the fact that nobody quite knows who killed these people, but the evidence all points to the fact that the canisters that were found at the site were put there, were placed there, were left there.
They were not dropped from the air.
Anyway, I don't want to go through the whole thing.
You know, again, if you want to know about it, or if anyone out there wants to know about it, you should read Aaron Marte's articles in The Grey Zone.
That's the first place to go.
And then you should read, I've forgotten his name, but the guy who actually started the OPCW, who was fired because he started asking questions.
You should read what he has to say about it.
This is the guy who started the OPCW, something for protection of chemical weapons.
Yeah, and if you question it, they say you're a conspiracy theorist and a Putin apologist and a Russian bot, and they just call you names and laugh at you as if...
You're an idiot, you know, which obviously I'm not.
And I had read an awful lot more than this, which is why we couldn't have a conversation about it, because he hadn't read any of this stuff.
Do you think they do that to just support their own argument, to try to make it look like it makes more sense what they're saying, and then calling you a conspiracy theorist?
So just for their own ego?
No.
Do you think that this is something that they're being encouraged to do by the publication?
If you want anti-Semitism to mean criticism of the Israeli government, you have to say this isn't like the anti-Semitism that we talked about, which is where you're down or criticize or say bad things about Jewish people or the Jewish faith.
That's what anti-Semitism means to me and to everybody else.
But it doesn't...
The idea that Israel can behave like people in the past behaved towards Jews in Northern Europe.
Oh, yeah, because some of the stories, you know, particularly in South America, where they were a bit needier than...
In Europe, they were by and large fairly all right, but in the United States, we did a thing...
They've just come back to me.
We had these kids who were a bit older than usual, and they were in Oakland, up in the Bay Area.
And they were black kids, all black kids.
You know, and the boys had sort of almost had moustaches, and they were surly and uncooperative and really, you know, very difficult to work with and didn't want to...
You know, and it was hard work and I can remember feeling a bit negative towards these people.
Anyway, they did it and they did the show and they were fine and whatever.
And like a week later, there was a phone call came in another city into the production office and it was a guy on the phone and he was talking to one of the girls in the office.
And he wanted to talk about these kids.
And she was busy and went, yeah, what?
He said, well, hold on a minute.
Don't get short with me.
I want to talk to somebody.
And I didn't talk to him, but somebody just went, oh, well, hold on.
Who's that?
Oh, it's Sean from Oakland, whatever.
I brought the kids to the show.
Oh, yeah.
Hi, Sean.
How are you doing?
He said, good, but I think I need to say something.
Could you pass this on to Roger?
Yeah, he said, because I could see it was difficult working with my kids.
He said, yeah, what?
He said, well, I want to tell you about those kids.
He said, none of them has two parents of those 12 kids, boys or girls.
They either have a mother or a father, but none of them have both.
If they have a mother, she's a hooker and she's a junkie.
If they have a father, he's in prison.
So if they were a bit uncooperative, I can feel myself getting emotional now.
That's why.
And he said, the other thing I want to tell you is this.
He said, nothing like that has ever happened to any of those children before.
And they've talked about nothing else since they came and did that show.
It's the first thing that they've ever done that they're proud of.
I honestly don't know because I hadn't spoken to Steve for years.
So I don't know.
He had more money than cents and he did a lot of junk.
Anyway, that's not the thing.
But he happened to be in Chicago and came to the gig in Chicago.
And when I heard this news about these kids in Oakland, so I said, you should send them some money, Steve, you're rich, to this group of kids in Oakland so they can maybe do something theatrical and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he said, you've got money.
Why don't you send them some money?
And so I think we sent them either 50 or 25 grand each.
And I was really glad.
So they got a cheque for 50 or 100 grand.
I don't know what it was.
I can't remember.
But they did, and I never spoke to the guy again, and I have no idea what happened to the money, and I don't know.
But I do remember when I heard him say, that's the most important thing that's ever happened to these children.
It's amazing, isn't it?
You touch those lives, however briefly.
And you brought it up because you talked about the kids in North Miami who weren't allowed to sing with me because some prick had told the mayor that I'm an anti-Semite.
Some probably very worthy feeling, you know, local Jewish community association.
And I'm sure they believe it.
They probably think I'm bloody, you know, Goebbels or somebody.
Well, luckily, I mean, I have lots of, you know, close friends who are in organizations all over the world who are actually Jewish people.
In Jewish Voice for Labour, I won't mention the names, but become close friends of mine.
So it's a weirdly divisive thing.
That anybody should think that the settler-colonial project in Palestine has anything to do with Judaism.
It shouldn't have.
You know, if you're going to be a settler-colonialist nation and subjugate the indigenous people to death, well, okay, but you can't do it under the cloak of your religion.
And so you can't criticize this because of my religion.
As I said to you before, how would that be if we suddenly decided that the United States was a theocracy and only Christians could have rights?
And I've had friends that have gone over there, and Abby Martin in particular, who's come on the podcast and said...
Talked about the atrocities that are committed there and even attacks on journalists and murdering of journalists over there by Israeli troops.
And, you know, she just gets mercilessly attacked for talking about this.
She even interviewed people on the street in Israel and asked them questions about Palestinians and got these horrific responses, dehumanizing the othering of those people.
I know Mike and Abby very well, and I believe you, and I've heard those stories from her as well.
Well, it's a small country, and they're a long way away, and the press is completely...
Well, it's not, actually.
Funnily enough, there's one independent paper called Haaretz in Israel.
And a close friend of mine, who is an Israeli Jew, writes articles for it, and they're very humane.
But somehow they just get brushed aside.
His name is Gideon Levy, if you ever want to look up somebody who's making sense from, you know, that side of the tracks or that part of the world.
Gideon's your man.
I don't know why.
It's very hard to shine a light brightly enough that people go, oh, I get it.
And particularly if the leader of your great country is going, I don't want to hear anything, I'm not interested, I will be the greatest supporter of Israel.
Three million percent that there's ever been ever in the whole history of everything, whatever they do, I don't care.
Regardless of how their policies impact individual human beings, through no fault of their own, just happen to be born Palestinian and been stuck in this apartheid state.
And the other thing is that they, you know, it's very binary in that way.
It's like you're either with Israel or you're with Hamas.
You're with this terrorist organization that puts its people in danger purposely and uses them as cannon fodder.
So they can gain support internationally and does all these human rights atrocities and launches missiles at Israel.
Well, they're also the democratically elected government of Gaza, Hamas.
And there is an armed wing and whatever.
But if you actually read international law at all or the Geneva Conventions, an occupied people have an absolute legal and moral right to resist the occupation.
And this is a fact that is not bandied about when they talk about firing rockets into Israel, which almost never do any damage because they're very ineffectual.
And another thing that is a great worry to the Palestinian community is that...
The Israelis seem now to have a policy of pushing them, murdering so many of them that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada so they can make it an armed conflict where they're a thousand times, ten thousand times more powerful than the Palestinian people who they are hoping will arm themselves and the young people gather together in bands and try and have an insurrection, an armed intercept, so they can just kill them all.
Does anybody have a clear path of resolution that makes sense for that area where they could sit down and come up with some sort of humane, logical, compassionate way to mitigate some of these problems?
All they want is for Liz Truss to move the UK Embassy to Jerusalem and compound the problem, just like Donald Trump did when he did that.
And he exacerbated the problem beyond all measure.
Because it's like, oh look, The President of the United States has said it's alright for us to annex the Golden Heights and occupy the whole of what was left of Palestine in 1967 and establish an apartheid state.
Donald Trump says it's okay.
Even though the whole international community up until that time had said, no, Jerusalem cannot be all combined under the control of the state of Israel.
That is not what we all agreed in 1947. And so the occupation in 1967 of East Jerusalem was illegal and still is.
All the settlements in the occupied territory are illegal, not just under international law, but under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well.
And it's also illegal not to allow the refugees to return into Israel as well.
You can't do it.
It's illegal.
But international law, as we know, because the United States isn't a party to the Treaty of Rome, they said, well, we didn't sign any of those treaties.
So we're not subject to international laws.
So...
The United Nations Charter is a wonderful document, but unfortunately, the United Nations came in the ashes of the Second World War and included within its charter is the fact that the five permanent members of the Security Council,
the United States, France, England, China, Russia all have the power of veto of any resolutions.
And so the United Nations actually has no teeth if you have the power of veto.
So you get anything to do with Israel is always vetoed.
Any resolution that says they better stop behaving badly and do the right thing, as my mother would say, is always vetoed by Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands, Australia, and a couple of other odds and sods.
It's always the same five or six people.
Well, who support, or rather who don't support resolutions in the General Assembly that say Israel should behave better.
So it's very difficult.
Thank goodness it exists and that people are allowed to stand up on their hind legs and make speeches.
And thank goodness that they can make alliances that are outside the control of the Security Council.
But they can't make it.
They can't exert any pressure.
There's no...
They can't make sanctions or...
They can't...
They can't exert pressure, so it has no teeth, but it is a great forum still for discussion.
I actually spoke, not to the General Assembly, but I spoke to the Human Rights Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations on the 29th of November 2012. Really?
I put a suit and tie on, and I called them Your Excellencies.
Well, the problem is, or a big problem here, as I've said many times before, is that that group, including Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bill Kristol and the rest of them, the whole neocon cabal has no interest in doing the right the whole neocon cabal has no interest in doing the right They want to rule the world.
That's all they care about.
And keep making money and never give any power to the people and make certain a democracy never appears anywhere in the world.
They want to be in charge of everything and keep everything going just as it is.
They want Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of them to get richer and richer.
And they don't give a fuck about the rest of you or me.
They don't care.
They probably find it hard to believe that we haven't revolted, that there hasn't been a revolution.
It's amazing how little support there is for him and how much...
You don't hear anybody outraged.
It's nothing.
Even if someone is in support of him being arrested or him being deported to the United States, there's no good argument.
There's nothing there.
Think about all the things that people have gotten away with.
I mean look at this fucking Ghislaine Maxwell thing.
Ghislaine Maxwell, I've said this before I'll say it again, she's the only person ever to be tried and arrested and put in jail for sex trafficking to no one.
There's no list.
Where's the list of the people that she sex trafficked to?
Well, the problem is we know that they're head state, billionaires, wealthy people, famous people.
Supposedly, it's hard to know whether or not that's true, but for sure, money's been exchanged.
Influence has been exchanged.
They're not throwing any bones.
There has to be a large group of people that were involved in this, and there's none that are being exposed, which is quite fascinating.
Because I guess if you did get exposed, if someone said, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah, head of this bank, we have evidence that you were having sex with underage girls...
That person could say, okay, what about Bill Clinton?