"This is Not a Drill"
Chris Hedges interview with Roger Waters
I highly recommend listening to Chris Hedges interview with Roger Waters which was live streamed last night.
This is Not a Drill
Roger Waters, co-founder of the legendary rock group Pink Floyd, discusses the genocide in Gaza, the deterioration of the West and his new movie on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Fame and fortune are often corrupting forces, ones that beget power and comfort. To stand with the afflicted requires sacrificing this privilege and few embody that sacrifice more profoundly than the legendary musician of Pink Floyd Roger Waters.
For years, through his music and political action, Waters has amplified the voices of the oppressed. He has championed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, defended attorney Steven Donziger, demanded the closure of Guantánamo Bay, has long stood against the apartheid state of Israel and now unwaveringly against the genocide of Palestinians.
Waters joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his political activism, including his support for Palestine Action, a group criminalized by the British government for their protest against Israel.
The pair discuss how Waters’ art has documented his moral devotion against oppression over the years while also examining the political decay — fueled by greed and corruption — of the United States, the United Kingdom and other world powers.
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Chris Hedges
There are very few artists or musicians who have stood as doggedly on the side of the oppressed as Roger Waters, the co-founder, bassist, singer, and songwriter for Pink Floyd. He has been an outspoken defender of Palestinian rights and critic of the apartheid state of Israel long before the genocide. He was one of the principal signers of an open letter called, “Artists Against Apartheid” and supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement denouncing musicians who perform in Israel.
He called out the fabrications disseminated by Israel that Hamas carried out systematic sexual assaults on October 7th. He attacked Labour leader Keir Starmer for his backing of the genocide and headlined a concert for Palestine with Cat Stevens and the rapper Lowkey.
He came to the defense of the British punk rap band, Bob Vylan, who, at this year's Glastonbury Festival, led the chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” referring to the Israeli Defense Force. After the British government banned Palestine Action, labeling it a terrorist group in the UK under the Terrorism Act of 2000, and then arresting 100 people for expressing their support for the group, he posted a video to X in which he praised Palestine Action as “a great organization,” noting they were non-violent and “absolutely not terrorists in any way.”
Membership in or public support for the group is now classified as a criminal offense and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison and/or a fine. In the video Roger can be seen making a sign from a piece of cardboard, “This says Roger Waters supports Palestine Action. Parliament has been corrupted by agents of a genocidal foreign power. Stand up and be counted. It's now,” the musician read. “This is the moment I am Spartacus.”
Israel and its Zionist allies have mounted vicious and sustained assaults against him, producing slanderous documentaries, engaging in a stream of defamatory attacks and character assassination, blocking publicity for his “This Is Not a Drill” concerts, pressuring music companies to cancel publishing agreements, forcing concert venues to blacklist him, even denying him hotel rooms while on tour. But Roger has never wavered.
He helped launch the campaign called “Countdown to Close Guantánamo”. He stood fast with Julian Assange during his long persecution, once performing outside the UK Home Office just miles from Belmarsh Prison where Julian was incarcerated singing Pink Floyd's iconic song, “Wish You Were Here.” The behavior of the British government towards Julian Assange is a disgrace, he said, a profanity on the very notion of human rights. It's no exaggeration to say that the treatment and persecution of Julian Assange is the way that dictatorships treat a political prisoner.
He backed the attorney, Steven Donziger, who won a $10 billion settlement against the oil giant Chevron on behalf of the indigenous peoples in Ecuador, whose land was poisoned and who suffered serious illnesses from toxins dumped by Chevron. Donziger endured a prolonged and savage campaign by Chevron that led to him being disbarred and placed under house arrest.
Roger, who a year ago released the songs, “Resist This Genocide” and “Stand Up for Palestine,” has launched a giant inflatable pig with Donald Trump's face on it at concerts in Mexico City, where Pink Floyd's “The Wall” is not an abstraction. He showed images of Trump dressed as a Nazi. And before the 300,000 fans in Mexico City flash the words, “Trump eres un pendejo,” “Trump is scum.”
He calls out Trump along with Joe Biden as war criminals. He endorsed Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, calling him, “A beacon of hope.” In short, his is an example of the moral life, which is always a life of confrontation. His courage is a reminder that standing against the forces of oppression comes with a cost. The global theatrical release of his new concert film, “This Is Not A Drill - Live From Prague,” the movie has just been released by Trafalgar Releasing and Sony Music Vision. Joining me to discuss our rapid descent into authoritarianism and the imperative of resistance is Roger Waters.
And let me just second your admiration for Palestine [Action]. These are courageous men and women who are actually trying to do something to stop the genocide. And just in case MI5 is watching, that's H-E-D-G-E-S. So Roger, let's begin where we are in this world. It's a world that you and I have feared and fought for a long time.
So, let's talk about where we've ended up. This fear of a creeping fascism, authoritarianism, which you have called out for decades, has now come to fruition.
Roger Waters
Yeah, well, this morning I woke up and the first thing I read, I think it was in the FT [Financial Times], is that some NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] general this morning or yesterday stood up and said, we must prepare for a world war in 2027, because Russia is going to try and steamroll its way with armored divisions across Europe and it won't stop until it reaches the English Channel.
Why they would stop at the English Channel, God only knows. But this is what this bloke's saying. And so he's really, he's drumming up support for taxing all the people of Europe, which they're now talking about trying to raise 4% or 5% of GDP to spend on weapons. And they're talking about importing many more nuclear weapons, so on and so forth.
And saying his great concern is that at the same moment that the Russians invade Paris or march into Paris, the Chinese will be invading Taiwan. So it's absolute baby talk, warmongering, but we shouldn't be surprised because they've been doing it ever since I was alive, practically. We had one or two years after the Second World War, which I don't remember too well because I wasn't old enough to really be taking notice, but we did.
We got a national health service and we sort of pretended that we were gonna look after one another and that we weren't gonna have any more wars. And look at us now. They're like, they're absolutely going gangbusters to make certain that war is permanent. Because that's how they make their living and they're entirely happy about it. And if they have to starve babies in Gaza, so be it. They couldn't care less. They have no interest in human rights.
This is what I always say when they say, what's the difference between like the bloke who owns the Four Seasons Hotel who won't let you stay in any of his hotels ever anywhere in the world again, and you, the difference is that I believe in human rights. It's very, very simple.
My platform is tiny. It's the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the 10th of December, 1948. I believe in it. I support it. They don't. They never have. I live in America. In America since 1776, they've been absolutely clear that they have no interest in human rights, freedom of speech, democracy, any of the things that they pretend to support. They don't. And we know it, but what can we do about it?
All we can do is go on encouraging ordinary people all over the world and there are billions of us to stand shoulder to shoulder and resist them and say no, you may want to devote your entire life to making Raytheon and [Northrop] Grumman and Palantir richer and keeping Jeff Bezos in $50 million weddings, but I don't.
I want to live in a world where my children can go to school and we can talk to one another and maybe go for a swim in the river. That's the world that I want, where we look after one another and we look after the weakest amongst us and so on and so forth. I am a socialist. Oh my God, no, wow, what could be, that's awful. You mean look after people?
Instead of stealing from them and spending all the money on weapons so that we can kill people. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. I know it's a bit long winded and I've spoken to… Chris and I have had conversations before and we're very similar. Both of us could go on forever but...
Chris Hedges: Well, as I come out of the church, how can I not be a socialist?
Roger Waters: Well, exactly.
Chris Hedges: And I want to just, on the point that you made, this is the brilliance of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. He showed that all of the gains that were made for working men and women, for people of color, for women, were done because of movements that fought against the dominant centers of power to open up space in our democracy, which is why, of course, they hate Zinn, why they're canceling him. Trump denounced him by name, not that he's read him, of course.
But this is the point that you're making, that it's only by essentially forming groups of solidarity like Palestine Resistance that we have any hope of pushing back against these forces. And then I also want to raise the great Francesca Albanese's report, her most recent report, which again buttresses the point that you just made, and that is that there are many, many corporations, Palantir and others, who of course are making huge profits, not only off of war, but off the genocide.
Roger Waters: Yep, this is true, everything that you say is true. So the trick is to wake up in the morning and not throw your hands up in despair and shoot yourself or whatever, but to go, I know it's crazy that the world is like this, clearly the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Obviously the Keir Starmers and Donald Trumps and [inaudible], or in fact, almost all the world leaders in the West are criminally insane.
And we should be looking after them on the National Health Service. They should be locked up in a loony bin with people going, there, there, Keir, calm down. Here's your pills for today. Just sit in the sun and be quiet. But they're not, they're running the world and they're running it extremely badly.
So all we can do is what you do and what I do and keep organizing and keep encouraging all those brave, wonderful people who go out every Saturday into the streets of London. Oh, that 83-year-old lady who was arrested outside the High Court in London for saying that, they're actually called Palestine Action, not Palestine Resistance, but Palestine Action. And hats off to her and how courageous and whatever.
And that's all we can do. Do you know what? The only thing I do, Chris, is I wake up in the morning and I go, I have to do one thing today. And I have to do it every single day. I have to do one thing, whether it's making a little video or doing this show with you or whatever. Any opportunity that I get, I will speak out. And I'm beginning to speak out a bit more about my industry and about how I've been, how they've tried to shut me up and still do.
There's all kinds of stuff that comes out all the time. At the moment, I'll tell you this now because at the moment, I've been working on a new version of “The Wall,” a new theatrical version of “The Wall.” And have been in conversations with The Sphere in [Las] Vegas to put it on there.
Chris Hedges: Right, but save me tickets.
Roger Waters: Okay, I will. I will, I promise to save you tickets.
Chris Hedges: A promise, that's recorded, Roger.
Roger Waters: Yeah, except, I don't think it's gonna happen. Irving Azoff, who is a well-known Zionist and a big figure in the music industry. He's the manager of the pop group, The Eagles. And he's also I think an investor in The Sphere and a big and very close to Jim, our friend Jim Dolan, who built the bloody thing.
I'm pretty sure that they're going to go, oops, we've changed our mind. Don't want you. Their voice will be in their ear the whole time.
Roger Waters: “You can't have, You can't encourage people to think that he has a voice or that he's got anything important to say. It doesn't matter that he wrote ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘The Wall’ and you know, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and all that and ‘Comfortably Numb’ and blah, blah, blah. ‘Wish You Were Here.’”And all those songs that our friend there with you has got on vinyl handed down to her by her father. None of that matters because he opposes the genocide and he's very vocal about it. He is not allowed a platform. So there we are. I'm not whining. I mean I do understand that that's the case there. And they will stop at nothing. Luckily, most of them have got IQs of about 30.
Like Greenblatt for instance, [CEO of the Anti-Defamation League] Jonathan Greenblatt. He's such a fool, but there you go. But he's got a loud voice and quite a big following and lots of funding behind it.
Chris Hedges: I want to go back to the lyrics you wrote for Pink Floyd, which is how many years, decades ago, but they're so prescient, I mean, as to where we've ended up.
Roger Waters: Go on then. Yeah, that is true. I mean, I mentioned “Comfortably Numb,” you know, and I'm not gonna repeat, I'm not gonna spew the lyrics out now, I could, but yeah, because that's a conversation between a disaffected rock star who is affected by the fame and fortune that he has stumbled upon through his chosen profession and turns into a Nazi thug.
And I play the Nazi thug in the piece, you know. Luckily, he wakes up. He goes, stop. In fact, the film that I've just released, in it, at the end of the song “Run Like Hell,” which I do two songs from the wall in the Nazi getup, and at the end of “Run Like Hell,” where it goes, stop, I wanna go, I'd stop, I'd take off the, and I make a speech.
And the speech I make in the movie is about the fact that there's been a huge uproar because I juxtaposed the names of Anne Frank, who was a victim of the Nazis in Holland. Was it Holland or?
Chris Hedges: Yeah, I think it was Holland.
Roger Waters: Holland, right. In 1943 or 44, I juxtaposed her name with Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by the Israelis a couple of years ago in Jenin, I believe, or on the outskirts of Jenin. And the Zionists went ape shit. How dare you desecrate Anne Frank?
Yeah, I also mentioned Sophie Scholl, do you remember her? The Germans killed her.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, The White Rose…
Roger Waters: With the White Rose Movement in Munich. Yeah. In 1943, she was, along with her brother Hans and Christoph Probst, they were all killed, they were all guillotined.
Chris Hedges: Let me just interrupt, for handing out leaflets.
Roger Waters: For handing out leaflets, exactly. Exactly. Well, Chris, you and I, today, we're handing out leaflets. This is what we're doing. And thank goodness we are.
Chris Hedges: I know. But the walls are closing in. I mean, we know where it's going. I covered [Augusto] Pinochet's Chile. We know what ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is going to become, our version of the Brownshirts. If anybody thinks they're going to stop with undocumented migrants, and of course, they're seizing people who have legal residence within the United States, students, they just are utterly blind to the mechanisms of authoritarianism and history.
And I think that's one of the things that, I have written about the Death of Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion, in many ways, in written form, what you've done musically, and signal this kind of warning. We can't allow this erosion of the open society because this is where we end up.
And I know that you've been attacked for using that fascist uniform, but of course that is the denouement of the assault that has been carried out in the name of neoliberalism and national security on our open society.
Roger Waters: Yes it is, yes it is. And you know what struck me when I was listening to you talking then was thinking about Trump. Let's just say Trump because he's the biggest of the leaders out there at the moment, leading this charge on everything. Trump is beyond ignorant in every way and he always was. He's always been monumentally stupid.
He's a terrible businessman, everybody knows. Nobody in New York will speak to Trump, particularly lawyers, because he never pays his bills.
Chris Hedges: And contractors, he doesn't pay his contractors either.
Roger Waters: Well, there you go. So he never pays anybody. He's an ignorant thug. And that is why he appeals to the MAGA crowd, I guess. They actually believe the slogan, Make America Great Again. America is becoming tiny and also a massive carbuncle on the potential beautiful face of the human race, of homo sapiens.
We have the potential to actually move into a future where we believe in love and truth and we look after one another and we refuse to murder one another. That's absolutely completely verboten in our brave new world.
Okay, but they're not, they believe in, no, no, no, let's murder everybody. Let's starve children to death because we can make money. And that's all they care about is making a profit. And it's enshrined sadly in American law. The only responsibility that the corporations have is to maximize the bottom line of the profits for their shareholders. It's capitalism at work. And capitalism could not be less interested in ordinary people, in you.
Chris Hedges:
Well, the other thing it does is inculcate within the society a culture of fear. So you have the internal and the external enemy. Look, I mean, you’ve raised this point many times, but it's about creating fear even if that enemy is a phantom, the way we've demonized hardworking immigrants who make $14,000 a year and work 10, 12 hours a day.
That has become a mechanism by which they will create this police state, which will affect all of us, the same way they have weaponized anti-Semitism as a way to shut down free speech. These are all tropes. These are all mechanisms. The idea that Trump cares about anti-Semitism is patently absurd. But it's about profit, but it's also about fear.
Roger Waters: Yeah, well, it's the exercise of control. You need to create an atmosphere of fear in the people. And I confess, Chris, that they've almost achieved it with me, saying if you come back to England, we're gonna lock you up for 14 years, or we have the legal right to, it's now the law of the land.
And so I can sit here as long as I want and go, but the law is an ass, just like it was an ass when it locked Julian Assange up. Thank goodness he eventually managed to do a deal and escaped back to Australia and is back in society with us now. But for them to corrupt the legal process like that, that's why I did my piece of cardboard on that Saturday morning, July the 5th, 2025.
That was my Independence Day. I am independent from the government of the United Kingdom because the government of the United Kingdom is a fascist cesspit. And so we have to stand up against it. Whether I'll go back and go to prison like a good resistor, I have no idea. It remains to be seen, maybe. Though all those brilliantly brave, wonderful people who take to the streets, every Saturday they do it, and they certainly have done since October the 7th, 2023.
And so, there is hope, there is hope in my heart because I see all these wonderful people continuing to resist. And all I can do is cheer them on and go for it and try and increase the volume of the voices in the crowd so that our voice gets louder and louder. And is it vain hope? No.
No, it's not a vain hope. But has it ever succeeded before in the long term? No. They always seem to be able to get the Pinkerton men together in large enough numbers with enough six shooters to shoot us down. So when we organize, their only recourse is to shoot us down, to hire mercenaries to kill us.
And that's what they're doing. This is what Trump stands for and that's what they're trying to do now. And you know, Sumud, the perseverance and resistance to the occupation in Palestine that the Arab speakers engaged in, in their resistance against that occupation is a guiding beacon for all of us. But my God, what they're having to suffer now is unconscionable and extraordinary that 300 million Americans are not in the streets going stop! Not in my name!
Well they're not. Maybe 3 million are. But what about the other 297 million? Why aren't they in the streets going no, this is not who I am. So, I don't know. Let's see what happens today and tomorrow and the day after that because none of this shit is going away in the near future.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask about the fact that the genocide is in many ways a message by the Global North to the Global South, the genocide in Gaza. Whether you think, I think many people in the Global South see it as such with the breakdown of the climate and the flight of climate refugees. But this, of course it rips off the veneer, it exposes what industrial nations like the United States or the UK are about but to what extent is it a harbinger of a new world?
Continue reading the transcript for the interview on Chris Hedges’s Substack.
Please share Chris Hedge’s original video and post linked below. If you don’t already, please consider subscribing to Chris’s Substack.
This was a wonderful interview, Azra. Thanks for sharing it.