 Zionists do not believe in human rights at all. They believe in the rights of, and Zionist rights. That's why they're entirely content to commit genocide on the people of Palestine and for the people of Palestine, the indigenous people, to have no human rights at all. So unless we, the people, all of us who are represented by you and to some extent by me, my audiences, for instance, join together and raise their voices in a unified choir, we will never convince one another that we have to get rid of this system. Absolutely lock, stop, and barrel. You can't change the thing that they mistakenly describe as democracy in the United States of America. You have to replace it with something that actually is. And to do that, you have to rest the power away from the very rich and give it back to the people. Hello. Welcome to People's Dispatch in Globetrotter. We're coming on to a new year 2024. It's very important, I think, that we recognize that 2023 has been one of the hardest years that many of us have lived through for a range of reasons, not least of which, of course, the brutal, brutal attack on the Palestinian people. There's no person better on the planet that I can think of that I'd like to talk to about some of these issues than Roger Waters. Roger has just completed a very, very, very long tour. This is not a drill. The first final tour, as he sometimes says, quite amusingly, Roger, welcome to People's Dispatch in Globetrotter. Thanks for your time. I saw your show two nights in Santiago, extraordinary explanation of the situation we live in now, a defense of human rights, a sonic defense of human rights, not just what you were saying, but also in the music. You were right through the tour from Germany to the UK to Argentina to Brazil, you were attacked at each point by the voices of those who are war makers and not peacemakers. Reflect a little bit for our viewers about the tour and about the nature of these attacks. Oh, my goodness. Well, let's always call this is not a drill. And so it's actually, it's a reflection, if you like, on a song that I wrote in 1972 called Time. And when I was 29 years old, and I had suddenly had a realization that I had thought it had been dined into me by my mother that I was in the process of preparing for a life that was going to happen at some point, I suddenly realized that no, no, we're in it right now. And it's strange, isn't it? How as we grow up, there's the faintest feeling that there might be something outside ourselves when we're a tiny baby. And then we eventually identified that as mother and maybe father depends how many of your parents are still alive, speaking of Gaza, which is, you know, in terms of Gaza is precious view. But anyway, so I'm going to ramble because that's the only way I know how to speak. But so you, you suddenly realized that you maybe you missed the starting card. Well, I realized that when I was 29 years old, I better get on with this and I've been getting on with it for the 50 years since. And my tour is still me getting on with it. But the reason for the title of the tour, this is not a drill, is trying to din this into everybody who comes to any one of my shows to say, this is not a drill, this is it. This is the attack. We are now under the attack of you were talking about Modi earlier attacking you personally. And you know, I'm under attack from Rishi Senak. The whole world is under attack from Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken and Victoria Newland and Jake Sutherland or whatever his fucking name is, and that holds neoliberal team because they are destroying the world. And it's not theirs to destroy. It's all of ours. It collectives. And it maybe it's not if we want to get kind of philosophical and zoological about it. Maybe it belongs to some of the animals as well. Maybe even the plant make who all living things we don't know. Because we don't completely understand the universe. We understand a lot more than Socrates did, you know, or Galileo or some of the people they locked up for being scientific and wanting to know answers to question. So who knows. So where so we are 2023 is the most dangerous year that there's ever been in the whole history of homo sapiens. And we can we can we know quite a lot about homo sapiens that for the last couple of hundred thousand years anyway, in terms of how we've developed our societies and gone from nomadic to agrarian to industrialization to this that and the other. And unfortunately, we have been overtaken by commerce. To the extent that the decision makers in the world, including Modi and Biden and all the others that we've known to that make the decisions and their decisions are all based upon the profit motive, literally, literally. And when you allow that motive to define the way that you make decisions, it is inevitable that you will destroy the planet and everything on it. Because because that is the logical end to the possibilities that the putter provides, because the globe is finite, you know. So if you're constantly trying to steal everything on the globe, and anything precious that's on it, today it's lithium. Who knows what it might be tomorrow? It has been oiled for the last hundred years or so. And once you decide that you want all those things so that you can live in a palace and dine on caviar and order people about and have people at your back and have slaves, really. Even if they even if you pay them a pittance to clean the ash trades or whatever it is that you need doing because you don't want to do it yourself, you know, or look after the swim. I don't know what. But once you decide that that is the that is correct, well, then what you're doing is you're providing for the emergence of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and all, and Zuckerberg and all the other asshole lollipops who own everything. And then you can invent a political system where you're allowed to buy the politicians through lobbies and through, you know, campaign donations and all that stuff so that you could you so you buy the thing that you pretend is actually a democratic institution where the people get to make political decisions about what they want to do. So you never take any note, don't have to take any notice of the people ever. That is why the job that you do is so important, why globe trotter and the people's dispatch and all the other repositories of the will of the people in terms of the written and spoken word line. That's why it's so important. Because unless we the people, all of us who are represented by you and to some extent by me, my audiences, for instance, join together and raise their voices in a unified choir, we will never convince one another that we have to get rid of this system. Absolutely lock, stop and barrel. You can't change the thing that they mistakenly describe as democracy in the United States of America. You have to replace it with something that actually is. And to do that, you have to rest the power away from the very rich and give it back to the people. But first of all, in order to do that, and this is where you and I come in, is we have to persuade the people that their voice has been stolen from them and that they are meaningless. There is no way that they can affect. And yet today, everyone can see that the Nazi government of the state of Israel is committing genocide, completely open and proudly, they're proud of it. And their soldiers and all and journalists are dancing around on the beach in Glasgow and going, look, now we have a beat. I mean, it's the most disgusting thing any of us have ever witnessed. Even people as old as I'm 80 years old, I've never seen anything like the bombing of Laos and, obviously, all of those wars, Iraq, Libya, all of those things were heinous, but nothing like this. This is the absolute triumph of the Nazi idea of supremacy. In their case, it was Aryans, you know, blonde Germans from the North, blah, blah. In this case, it's Ashkenazi Jews, Northern European Jews who come and settled and colonized Palestine. And they're going, we are special. How do you know that? Because it's written in the Bible. God told us we are special. Everybody else is irrelevant, particularly these people who have committed the appalling, atrocious crime of living here on land that we want for the greater glory of Eretz Israel, which we will spread all over Jordan all over Lebanon, probably all over Egypt, probably they would probably want to expand all over everywhere. They've talked about Jordan, Trans Jordan, blah, blah, blah. So it's happening all day. It's happening today. It's happening all day today, the 27th of December. It's been happening since the 8th of October, right in front of our eyes. They're absolutely declared intent to kill every single Palestinian. So there's not a single one left. And then they don't have whatever they and they can't have it because we will not allow it. And I'm so happy to see the world, the whole world is rising in demonstration against them all over the world. What was it in the Yemen the other day, a million people over a million people in the street. It's all over a video I put out a few days ago. I'm quite right. So certainly the Yemeni people, the Houthis, who now represent the whole of the Yemen, now that they haven't got the Saudi Arabians and the Americans bombing them to death every day, raising their voice. And they're saying, no, you can't do this. And they are next to the Red Sea. And they're saying, you can't have any Israeli, this will spread all over the world. They're going to close down the ports in Vancouver and in San Francisco and in San Diego and in Southampton and in Delhi. I don't know if you have a port, but it's or in Mumbai, you know, they're going to close all the ports as we you cannot have a ship here. You cannot do business with anybody because you're Nazis and we won't allow it. I mean, I know we were late coming to the party in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. But eventually we did all come together. I know the Russians had already defeated the Wehrmacht by the time that some of us got into the war. But nevertheless, we did see off Goebbels and Göring and Eichmann and Hitler. We saw them off. We said, no, no. And we had tried. Well, we're going to see off Netanyahu and Ben Gavir and all the rest of the Nazis who are in control of the state of Israel. We will see them off. What we all have to hope is it doesn't turn into the Third World War. Unfortunately, they have nuclear weapons, thanks to the French and the Brits and the Americans and a few other imperialist nations. Because we have to say, like, I'm an Englishman, I have to accept the fact that we did a lot of the groundwork for this when we discovered how to make hearts of oak, big boats. So did the Portuguese and the Spanish, more or less the same term, and the Germans and the Dutch and the Belgians. Let's not forget the Conga. And we went off around the world murdering and stealing. And it was, it was, it were the great colonial times. And we were proud of it for a while. We're not proud of it anymore. We're disgusted by it. Unless we're the right wing elements of the Australian, you know, powers that be, who maybe are not yet ashamed of their genocide of the indigenous people of Australasia, or the Americans, obviously, or the Europeans, the English and the French, and, and the Germans, and all European families who all settled North America and killed the Native Americans, committed genocide and all the Native Americans. So this is, this is a question that we haven't really looked at until now. Now we're repeating itself in the Holy Land. So that's why we're all coming together to stop it. Yeah, one of the most puzzling things for me, Roger, and I don't mean to sound naive about this because I will understand why the city of Frankfurt went after you. I will understand why British parliamentarian called for your shows to be cancelled in the UK. I'm well aware and understand why the right wing press in Brazil went after you when you were doing your concerts there, or that you couldn't get a hotel room in Buenos Aires. I will understand why that is. On the other hand, I do want, you know, I want this question to be asked of you because I also fear that sometimes because we know the answer to the question we get cynical and we think, well, you know, that's, that's how it is. In fact, I've seen a number of your shows, I've listened to all your music, you know, I read a lot of things that you say, and at the bottom of everything are two words, human rights. At the show in Santiago, during this is not a drill on the stage, the beautiful, beautiful stage in enormous letters, human rights, human rights, the phrase seized fire, you're not calling for a war, you're not calling for extermination, you're not calling for annihilation, you talk about human rights and end war. And yet it is your voice that they're trying to close down, reflect a little bit for people about the complete irrationality of the attempt to silence Roger Waters. Well, it's not irrational at all. It's entirely rational. It's because of those things. It's because I believe in human rights that they want to shut me down and silence me. Because if I, when I get up on my hand, let hind legs and start talking about the Palestinians and how they should have it, for instance, the guy who wouldn't let me stand is well, there were lots of them got together. They're all, they're all, but let me say this, and this is not anti-Semitic. They're all owned by Jewish people. Some Jewish people are Zionists. Okay, so let's not, let's make that absolutely clear before we start talking about this. We know, you know, it's ridiculous to say, but some of our best friends are Jewish people, and they're lovely, and they believe in human rights to every, to the very depths and core of their being. It's part of their religion. Zionists do not believe in human rights at all. They believe in the rights of, and Zionist rights. That's why they're entirely content to commit genocide on the people of Palestine and for the people of Palestine, the indigenous people to have no human rights at all. That is why over the last 20 years or so that I've been involved in the struggle for Palestinian human rights, I've finally managed to winnow away all the chaff and come down to the platform upon which I stand. And it is exactly what you say. And that's what I always say. Paris, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the fledgling United Nations after the Second World. Boom, there it is. Finally enough, it's December. So it's a few months after the Nachba, which was in May 1948. But nevertheless, it's the same. So that is why they attack me. And I stood on stage and said that, look, here's this bloke. What's his name? Kopolsky or something or other. He owns every four seasons hotel in the world. I had his name written out and left on the piano so I could remember. This is the man who won't let me stay in any four seasons hotel anywhere in the world ever because he claims I'm an anti-Semite. Right? He claims that. Well, good luck. I say good for you. And I threw his name on the floor where it belongs because he's lying. This is a lie because I am not an anti-Semite. As I said to Glenn Greenwald in a fairly famous now interview I did with him in the November in Rio de Janeiro where I said there was something fishy about the Israeli narrative of October the 7th and the Hamas attack on their military installations and a music festival and some kibbutzi. And so I said there's something very fishy about the stories coming out of that. And for that, that was when it all happened again. There was a huge furore about it, suggesting that I was an anti-Semite. That's why I'm lying about the Israeli version of what happened. No, it's not. It's because I care about the truth and there was something fishy about it and I was right to be curious about it. And now the evidence is coming out showing that I was absolutely right to be fishy and they were lying about it and they've gone on lying about it ever since. Everything that they say is a lie. So what I say on stage is I say there's a difference between the people who are trying to cancel my concerts and me. The people who won't let me stay in their hotels and me. There's a difference between me and them. And the difference is I believe in human rights for all my brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of their ethnicity or their nationality or their religion. That's all and they don't. And it's the truth. And what they cannot abide is the truth. And my show, this is not a drill, is telling the truth about the tactics of the powers that they and the oligarchs and the people with money and how they operate and how they manage to do it and how it is that there is no no almost no democracy anywhere in the world. There are a few countries in the world where there's at least an attempt to see if it might work like for instance Chile. Now the barrage is in charge or Venezuela under Maduro but certainly not in the United States of America. There hasn't been a single idea or even question that there might be something democratic about this since well certainly since the Second World War maybe maybe Roosevelt has one or two good intentions in the New Deal. But since then it's been completely controlled and we all know it. That's why you are being banned from returning to your homeland and that is why they are trying to silence me. They haven't quite cut off my Instagram account yet or my what's the thing that used to be called Twitter ex or whether or not post things or not but they will. I'm sure they will. They'll get round to it. They go no this guy is actually too dangerous because he does speak the truth and we know he speaks the truth but we need our lies to trump his truth. Well that's going to be difficult for them. I mean when are they going to shut our friend Jeffrey Sachs down after his thing this morning that he wrote about just how corrupt the United States government is and just how evil it is and just how dangerous. I don't know but thank you for coming to the shows and I'm so happy I did them because I am the only one out there in rock and roll and doing anything political in the rock and roll arena which is pretty weird because they always have that sort of reputation you know going back to Barry McGuire you know what was what was that famous song Eve of Destruction. I forget nouns all the time now so if I pause occasionally you must forgive me but here we are on the eve of destruction yet again and we've all known it all long and we'll we'll know why profit profit profit profit let's make the rich even richer but now there's so countless about it and they're so comfortable in the seats of power they think they can do it without us and don't you see well hang on when people get to the end of the month and they realize that their credit card bill has gone up if they have a credit card and that they can't afford a loaf of bread or to put a couple of gallons of fuel in the car or pay the electricity bill or keep up with the rent or anything and suddenly they're homeless and what did they do they worked hard all their life you know the the powers that be try and spread the lie that the reason poor people are poor is because they haven't worked hard enough or applied themselves they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop sponging off the state this is the lie that they sell now they don't they work their asses off many of them in two or three jobs they work all day and then go and do another job at night because they're being squeezed so hard by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk that there's fuck all left for them to buy the children have crossed a fucking bread with so so so so yeah it's a global struggle and I think I thank you for for globetrotter and for the tricontinental and for all the writing that you do and whatever and all my other friends who were doing the same thing over and we shall overcome that's amazing Roger while you were in Brazil in Sao Paulo on the 13th of November you sat down and wrote something quite moving about the US presidential election which comes in 2025 well presidential election presidential selection who knows what it is it's certainly not much about democracy I wonder if you'd read to help us close out this segment at least the last section of that really beautiful text um written in Brazil in November all right I will well it was the 13th November blah blah blah and I said all the things that we believe in and then I mentioned a whole new cabinet for you know as you say Cornel West obviously is the president and John Miersheimer and Jeffrey Sachs and Ray McGovern and a lot of people and there are 17 more members of the cabinet I won't go through it all um here we go this is the end a cabinet that believes in those two cornerstones of a moral legal high ground could change US foreign policy in ways that would willy-nilly erase the United States of its complicity in the war crime that is the genocide of the Palestinian people and might even ensure that the US would never be complicit in such unconscionable savagery again should such a thing come to pass I can almost feel the giant sweet breath of a smile that would sweep across our beautiful planet as the huge global choir of like-minded souls who also believe in human rights breathes out its long end-up joyful exhalation of relief may God forgive them the dealers in death have been retired to the loony bin where they belong the world finally woke up now we can open our loving arms now we can stop killing the children now we can go home love Roger that's why well well now we can go home Roger Waters thanks a lot you're very very welcome Vijay for sure thank you a lot