ROGER WATERS’ SPEECH TO THE UN

Roger Waters, the old rocker who founded Pink Floyd, has been universally condemned by the Mainstream Media for a speech he made yesterday to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Outraged headlines suggest that Waters is a stooge of Putler, and an enemy of freedom. I watched his speech and thought it entirely sensible. He spoke from a consistent and intelligent anti-war position – which supports neither NATO, nor Russia, and demands an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.

I entirely agree with him, deplore the ad-hominem attacks against him, and am pleased to print the entire contents of Waters’ speech here:

Madame/Mr President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I feel profoundly honoured to be afforded this singular opportunity to brief your excellencies today. With your forbearance, I shall endeavour to express what I believe to be the feelings of countless of our brothers and sisters all over the world, both here in NY and across the seas. I shall invite them into these hallowed halls to have their say.

We are here to consider possibilities for peace in war-torn Ukraine, especially in light of the increasing volume of weapons arriving in that unhappy country. Every morning when I sit down at my laptop, I think of our brothers and sisters, in Ukraine and elsewhere, who, through no fault of their own find themselves in dire and often deadly circumstances. Over there, in Ukraine they may be soldiers facing another deadly day at the front, or they may be mothers or fathers facing the awful question how can I feed my child today, or they may be civilians knowing that today the lights will go out, for sure, as they always do in war zones, knowing that there is no fresh water, that there is no fuel for the stove, no blanket, just barbed wire and watch towers and walls and enmity. Or, they may be over here, in a big rich city like NY, here brothers and sisters can still find themselves in dire straights. Maybe, somehow, however hard they worked all their lives, they lost their footing on the slippery tilting deck of the neo-liberal capitalist ship we call life in the city and fell overboard to end up drowning.. Maybe they got sick, or maybe they took out a student loan, maybe they missed a payment, the margins are slim, who knows, but now they live on the street in a pile of cardboard, maybe even within sight of this United Nations building. Anyway, wherever they are, all over the world, war zone or not, together they make up a majority, a voiceless majority. Today I shall endeavor to speak for them.

We the people wish to live. We wish to live in peace in conditions of parity that give us the real opportunity to look after ourselves and our loved ones. We are hard workers and we are ready to work hard. All we need is a fair crack of the whip. Maybe that’s an unfortunate choice of idiom, after five hundred years of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery.

Anyway Please help us.

To help us you may have to consider our predicament, and to do so you may have to take your eye off the ball for a moment, to put your own goals momentarily to one side. What are your goals by the way? And here maybe I direct my inquiries more to the five permanent members of this Council. What are your goals? What is in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Bigger profits for war industries? More power globally? A bigger share of the global cake? Is mother earth a cake to be gobbled up? Does not a bigger share of the cake mean less for everyone else? What if today, in this place of safety, we were to look in another direction, to look at our capacity for empathy for instance, to put ourselves in other’s shoes, like, right now, for instance, the shoes of that chap on the other side of this room, or even the shoes of the voiceless majority, if they have any shoes that is.

The Voiceless Majority is concerned that your wars, yes your wars, for these perpetual wars are not of our choosing, that your wars will destroy the planet that is our home, and along with every other living thing we will be sacrificed on the altar of two things, profits from the war to line the pockets of the very, very, few and the hegemonic march of some empire or other towards unipolar world domination. Please reassure us that that is not your vision for there is no good outcome down that road. That road leads only to disaster, everyone on that road has a red button in their briefcase and the further we go down that road the closer the itchy fingers get to that red button and the closer we all get to Armageddon. Look across the room, at this level we’re all wearing the same shoes.

So back to Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine by The Russian Federation was illegal. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Also, The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not “unprovoked”, so I also condemn the provokateurs in the strongest possible terms. There, that’s got that out of the way.

When I wrote this speech yesterday, I included an observation that the power of veto in this council only lay in the hands of its permanent members, I was concerned that that was was undemocratic and rendered This Council toothless…. This morning I had a revelation……..TOOTHLESS! maybe toothless is in some ways a good thing……..If this is a toothless chamber……..I can open my big mouth on behalf of the voiceless without getting my head bitten off……. How cool is that. I read in the paper this morning, some anonymous diplomat quoted as saying, “Roger Waters! To address the Security Council? Whatever next?….. Mr Bean! Hwah! Hwah! Hwah! For those of you who don’t know, Mr Bean is an ineffectual character in an English comedy show on TV. So it’s a penny to a pound the anonymous diplomat is an Englishman, Hwah! hwah! hwah! To you too Sir! Ok, I think it’s time to introduce my mother, Mary Duncan Waters, she was a big influence on me, she was a school teacher, I say was, she’s been dead for fifteen years. My father, Eric Fletcher Waters, was a big influence on me too, he too is dead, he was killed on the 18th of February 1944 at Aprilia near The Anzio Bridgehead in Italy, when I was only five months old, so I know something about war and loss. Anyway back to my Mum. When I was about thirteen I was struggling with some knotty adolescent problem or other trying to decide what to do, it doesn’t matter what it was, I can’t remember anyway, but my mum sat me down and said, “Listen, you’re going to be faced with many knotty problems during your life and when you are here’s my advice, read, read, read find out everything you can about whatever it is, look at it from all sides, all angles, listen to all opinions, especially ones you don’t agree with, research it thoroughly, when you’ve done that you will have done all the heavy lifting and the next bit is easy, “Is it? Ok mum what’s the easy bit?”…….”Oh, the easy bit is, you just do the right thing.“ Hmm!

So speaking of doing the right thing brings me to human rights.

We the people, want universal human rights for all our brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of their ethnicity, religion or nationality. To be clear, that would include but would not be limited to the right to life and property under the law for, for instance, Ukrainians, and for instance Palestinians. Yup, let that sink in. And obviously for all the rest of us. One of the problems with wars is that in a war zone or anywhere where the people live under military occupation, there is no recourse to the law, there are no human rights.

Today our brief is the possibility of peace in the Ukraine, with special reference to the arming of the Kiev regime by third parties.

I’m running out of time so,

What do the Voiceless millions have to say?

They say
Thank you for hearing us today
We are the many who do not share in the profits of the war industry.
We do not willingly raise our sons or daughters
To provide fodder for your cannons.
In our opinion
The only sensible course of action today
Is to call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
No ifs, no buts, no ands.
Not one more Ukrainian or Russian life is to be spent.
Not one.
They are all precious in our eyes.

So, the time has come to speak truth to power. You all remember the story of the Emperor’s new clothes? Of course you do. Well the leaders of your respective Empires stand, in one degree or another, naked before us. We have a message for them. It is a message from all the refugees in all the camps, a message from all the slums and favelas, a message from all the homeless, on all the cold streets, from all the earthquakes and floods, on earth. It is also a message from all the people, not quite starving but wondering how on earth to make the pittance they earn, meet the cost of a roof over their head and food for their families. My mother country England is, thank god, an Empire no more, but in that country now, there is a new catch phrase “Eat or Heat?” you can’t do both. It’s a cry echoing round the whole of Europe.

Apparently, the only thing the Powers that Be think we can all afford is perpetual war. How crazy is that?

So, from the four billion or so brothers and sisters in this Voiceless Majority who together with the millions in the international anti-war movement represent a huge constituency, enough is enough! We demand change.

President Biden, President Putin, President Zelenski,
USA, NATO, RUSSIA, THE EU, ALL OF YOU.
PLEASE CHANGE COURSE NOW,
AGREE TO A CEASEFIRE IN UKRAINE TODAY.

That, of course, will only be the starting point. But everything extrapolates from that starting point. Imagine the collective global sigh of relief. The outpouring of joy. The international joining of voices in harmony singing an anthem to peace! John Lennon pumping the air with his fist from the grave. We have finally been heard in the corridors of power. The bullies in the schoolyard have agreed to stop playing nuclear chicken. We’re not all going to die in a nuclear holocaust after all. At least not today. The powers that be have been persuaded to drop the arms race and perpetual war as their accepted modus operandum. We can stop squandering all our precious resources on war. We can feed our children, we can keep them warm. We may even learn to cooperate with all our brothers and sisters and even save our beautiful planet home from destruction. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Your Excellencies,

I thank you for your forbearance.

Roger Waters

ON THE EFFIN’ BRINK

Back in January 2017 I wrote the first of a series of thirteen pieces titled “Dodging the Bullet.” The theme was nuclear war: how miraculous it is that we haven’t had one since Nagasaki, and how blase the mainstream media and political class are about the possibility of one happening today. I called it “Dodging the Bullet” because that seems to me such a uniquely American expression – the idea that anyone can dodge a bullet is absurd, and yet the concept clearly exists. “Dodged that bullet, bro!” But no one can.

One thing that encouraged me was the United Nations treaty to ban the possession and use of nuclear weapons: the sheer number of countries that signed up for it. Just about the only countries which didn’t sign up were the ones which own nuclear weapons, plus all the members of NATO. It seemed a fine example, which might even influence a NATO membert or two. How about Spain? The last piece I wrote was about US plans for war with Russia, based on US Army publications. That was in July 2021. I’d written everything I could think of on the subject, I thought.

Wrong. Instead, an entirely preventable, regional war is spinning out of control due to the US and NATO’s desire to keep it going. Careers (in NATO and the arms industry) are made from threatening war and further enhanced (for a while) from making it. Pundits and politicians, Raytheon and Northrop, the three-letter-agencies, all profited and rose in status as a result of destroying Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Libya, and Syria, and…

It was easy, as an American professional politician once remarked, to throw some shitty little country up against the wall every few years. It didn’t matter if this policy killed millions, wrecked functioning states, and created wave after desperate wave of unwelcomed refugees. For the people with a bit of money, war was always good business, and they could invest somebody else’s son.

Now US and NATO politicians bay for a boots-on-the-ground, shooting war with Russia. Maybe they will get one. In the mean time, they are practicing:

Starting on January 29 (a month before the invasion of Ukraine), NATO began war games in Estonia, on Russia’s border. British, French, and Estonian troops practiced “force on force” attacks, live fire, and anti-tank exercises. NATO’s “Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroup Estonia” is led by the UK’s Royal Tank Regiment, with France and Denmark providing forces on a rotational basis. Iceland also participates. NATO has other “Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroups” in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. These exercises were followed by “Operation Bold Dragon”, which began this month and involves aerial war games over Estonia by the Belgians, UK, French and Danes. Belgian F-16s have been deployed to Estonia for an indefinite period.

Meanwhile, in tiny Latvia, adjacent to Estonia, and also sharing a border with Russia, NATO has just started the “Namejs 2022” military exercises: a series of war games involving soldiers from the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Czech Republic, Italy, Iceland, Montenegro, Canada, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.

In case you thought Lithuania was being ignored, don’t worry. This small state, which shares a border with the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, recently hosted its largest-ever NATO outdoor combat operations: “Exercise Iron Wolf”, involving thousands of troops from the US, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Poland, plus the Lithuanian “Iron Wolf Brigade.” Another round is scheduled this year.

No doubt these ongoing NATO war games on their border in wartime will not be interpreted by Russia as aggressive in any way. We must all reassure ourselves that NATO’s pretend attacks and incursions will never accidentally spark a thermonuclear war.

If you would like a playlist to enjoy while following the progress of Exercise Iron Wolf, I recommend a couple of songs from The Clash. They’re both on the Sandinista album and entirely of this moment: the anti-war song The Call Up and the disco anthem, Ivan Meets GI Joe.

[Update: not that it makes any real difference, but the US, despite its congenital inability to appoint ambassadors, has managed to appoint one to oversee the brinkmanship in Ukraine. Her name? I kid you not: Bridget Brink.]

[Another update — continuing the Brink Theme, there is an organization called Back From The Brink, which seeks to convince the US government to renounce first use, cancel the 1.7 trillion dollar nuclear upgrade, and “actively pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals” which sounds pretty weeny. “Actively pursue a verifiable agreement” is like “provide access to health care” – meaningless Democrat-ese which ultimately produces nothing. But less money for war is always a good cause.]