White supremacists are nothing if not perverse. Look what they did to the ok sign?
Roger Waters has managed to twist things around to calling Israel itself anti-Semitic.
In general, criticizing Israel does not represent anti-Semitism. Grotesque, over-the-top attacks on Israel, especially those evoking classic anti-Semitic tropes, commonly constitute anti-Semitism.
"The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock’n roll as they say. I promise you, naming no names, I’ve spoken to people who are terrified that if they stand shoulder to shoulder with me they are going to get f****” - Roger Waters
What about by means of the occupation and the killing. Is that a means we could use to equivalate? Spitballing here.
Yeah. More filler than a gas-station hot dog.
Well, it kind of fills me with the urge to defecate.
Fundamentally, I think Waters’ problem is one shared by many pacifists, and not the least of which are the bleeding hearts and the artists: he can’t distinguish between a defensive war and a war of aggression. If there is a war, even if it’s because one side invaded the other, #bothsides are wrong for fighting, and anyone who helps either side fight, even if only to help one side resist occupation, is just as bad. He previewed this attitude quite clearly with The Final Cut.
See, I would disagree with this. Just looking at the primary source, both The Wall and Rogers’ contemporary comments, it was just a fantasy of a neurotic self-pitying rock star who ultimately descended into madness, blaming it on the loss of his father in the war and a long string of meanies who just don’t get him. It culminates in a total collapse of his defense mechanisms. Ultimately, he learns nothing, and nothing is resolved. In the years after, the public looked at this palette of provocative but unexpected symbols and decided that certainly it must mean something.
Of course, with Waters being a dullard and a has-been who has little going for him except for dining out on his career pinnacle of 1979, he has leaned into whatever public interpretation continues filling seats and generating buzz. If the fans want anti-fascism with a darkly thrilling vicarious experience of actual fascism, he’s happy to oblige.
But it really takes little effort to look at Waters’ other creative output and public commentary to understand that the man is just playing with symbology to make a spectacle, and does not have the intellect to form any political theory coherent enough to be called anti-fascism. We need only look at his fawning uncritical siding with actual fascism (Russia) in the present day to understand this.
Rogers’ behavior reflects nothing but his attention-seeking contrarian nature combined with the weird British penchant of doing Nazi cosplay and rationalizing it after the fact. And the public understands The Wall to be about anti-fascism in the same way that it understands Deliverance to be about banjos; a thing that has become technically true through decades of reductive misunderstanding, but is mostly unrelated to the contemporary inspiration for the work.
The irony is that this is exactly what happened to the real Roger Waters.
‘And they said I was the crazy one!’ ~ Sid
Art is what the observer makes of it. The artist expresses a thing and the result is what the audience makes of it. Once released, it no longer really belongs to the artist.
Expression falls somewhere in the range between discourse and evocation, art primarily trending toward the latter: it is about what it makes you feel. Sometimes discourse amplifies itself through evocative (artistic) punctuations/enhancements, sometime art embeds elements of discourse in order to evoke a feeling.
The Wall is primarily evocative, using a fair amount of discourse to achieve its end. It is not really about anything beyond itself and its emotional effect – this in contrast to The Final Cut, which is primarily discoursive with an evocative backdrop. If listeners say that The Wall is about a larger thing, that is their own takeaway, which does not, in my opinion, reflect what was origially intended – but it becomes what the greater audience believes it to be, because it was put out there for us to do with as we will.
Go on, EinsteinsHund! Shit on him!
Why does everyone want to tear down the wall?
They are copying the home renovation TV shows. Doesn’t everyone want an open floor plan?
“Isn’t this where we came in?”
Welcome back my friend, to the show that …
umm, hold on
Get him up against the wall!
Shine on you crazy diamond.
He’s gross.
You little shit, you’re in it now, I hope they throw away the key…
He just better make his face up in his favorite disguise, with the button down and the roller blind eyes. The empty smile and the hungry heart, well, I think he already has that.