Guests at the Fletcher Memorial Home, for incurable tyrants and kings:
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Reagan and Haig
Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher, and Paisley (Hello Maggie!)
Mr. Brezhnev and party
The ghost of McCarthy
And the memories of Nixon
Brezhnev, si, Putin Nyet
eta: At least Rog’s current spews haven’t made me want to quit listening to PF. I’ve thought Rog was a wanker since about 1980, so this is just more, not new. I wanted to ask him in the time of the Final Cut if he thought we should have fought WWII. Now I know that answer would be no.
For Roger the overriding concern is that western plutocrats are salivating at the profit-potential of a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine and thus we are only playing into the hands of the profiteers by going all sappy and rooting for the underdog, who should have capitulated at the outset in order to prevent this humanitarian catastrophe. That is the whole and unvarnished gist of it. Tortured and untenable, yes, but we all do weird things as we get older.
Yeah that sounds right, it’s looking back even before dad’s death, to the folks decrying that WW1 was all the fault of the armaments profiteers.
In that worldview whatever war were happening now would just be the Western Military Industrial Complex looking for another business opportunity. Mind you, yeah, as Ike said, you should not trust the MilIndCon. But dammit, from there to the notion that people should just roll over and accept subjugation for the sake of avoiding hardship and not playing along…
As I understand it, he’s not a Putin supporter, he’s just bemoaning the fact that thousands of civilians have died so far and that most would likely still be alive if the Ukraine capitulated. Now I think that’s grossly naive and short-sighted, but not necessarily an evil position. He’s a pacifist at heart and always will be.
In other words, while I disagree with him on this issue, it doesn’t rise to the point that I’d throw away tickets to his concert. YMMV of course.
I hear you. It doesn’t look good that he appears to be asking for Ukraine to back down and not Russia. But maybe he’s being practical here – like maybe he thinks he has a chance to convince Zelenskyy whereas he has no chance to convince Putin, so why bother?
I know, it’s a reach, and I’m likely being overly charitable here. But until Waters comes out and says something direct like “Putin is absolutely in the right here” I keep wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Writing a letter like that to the wife of a President of a country that is under outright war from Russia is fucked up beyond belief. And I like Roger Waters. Well, I mean I want to, and I used to.
Actually, it’s wholly possible the war would have been shorter without Lend Lease. Of course, the result of the war would have been, to say the very least, regrettable.
