Roger Waters به عبارت دیگر: گفتگو با راجر واترز

خواننده و موزیسین 
22/10/2013  تاریخ پخش
BBCPersian

Roger Waters: Why I must speak out on Israel, Palestine and BDS

ROGER WATERS, MONDAY, MAR 17, 2014


Salon exclusive: The Pink Floyd star details why he supports the boycott

 AP/Bebeto Matthews

Seventy years ago, my father – 2nd Lt. Eric Fletcher Waters – died in Italy fighting the Nazis. He was a committed pacifist, and a conscientious objector at the start of the war, but as Hitler’s crimes spread across Europe, he swapped the ambulance he had driven through the London blitz for a tin hat and a commission in the Royal Fusiliers and he joined the fight against fascism. He was killed near Aprilia in the battle for the Anzio Bridgehead on Feb. 18, 1944.  My mother – Mary Duncan Waters – spent the rest of her life politically active, striving always to ensure that her children, and everyone else’s children, had no Sword of Damocles in the form of the despised Nazi Creed or any other despicable creed hanging over their heads.

Last month, thanks to the good people of Aprilia and Anzio, I was able to pay tribute to the father I never knew by unveiling a memorial in the town where he died and laying a wreath to honor him, and all the other fallen. Losing my father before I ever knew him and being brought up by a single, working mother who fought tirelessly for equality and justice colored my life in far-reaching ways and has driven all my work. And, at this point in my journey, I like to think that I pay tribute to both my parents each time I speak out in support of any beleaguered people denied the freedom and justice that I believe all of us deserve.

After visiting Israel in 2005 and the West Bank the following year, I was deeply moved and concerned by what I saw, and determined to add my voice to those searching for an equitable and lawful solution to the problem – for both Palestinians and Jews.

Given my upbringing, I really had no choice.

In 2005, Palestinian civil society appealed to people of conscience all over the world to act where governments had failed. They asked us to join their nonviolent movement – for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) – which aims to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, to secure equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to uphold the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the cities and villages they were violently forced out of in 1948 and 1967.

After more than two decades of negotiations, the vulnerable Palestinian population still lives under occupation, while more land is taken, more illegal settlements built, and more Palestinians are imprisoned, injured or killed struggling for the right to live in dignity and peace, to raise their families, to till their land, to aspire to each and every human goal, just like the rest of us. The Palestinians’ prolonged statelessness has made them among the most vulnerable of all peoples, particularly in their diaspora where, as now in Syria, they are subject, as stateless, powerless refugees, to targeted violence, from all sides in that bloody conflict, subject to unimaginable hardship and  deprivation and, in many cases, particularly for the vulnerable young, to starvation.   

What can we all do to advance the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories, Israel and the diaspora? Well, BDS is a nonviolent, citizen-led movement that is grounded in universal principles of human rights for all people. All people! In consequence, I have determined that the BDS approach is one I can fully support.

I feel honored to stand in solidarity alongside my father and my mother, and alongside my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and so many others of all colors, faiths and circumstances from all over the world – including an ever-increasing number of courageous Jewish Americans and Israelis – who have also answered the call.

In the furor that exists in the U.S. today about BDS and the right and wrong of a cultural boycott of Israel, a quote from one of my heroes, Mahatma Gandhi, has been on my mind. He prophetically said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  The BDS movement is fulfilling its promise and fits Gandhi’s description.  Once dismissed by many as a futile strategy that would “never work,” BDS has gained much ground in recent weeks, bringing with it the expected backlash.

Divestment votes at major U.S. universities, European pension funds divesting from Israeli banks that do business with illegal Israeli settlements, and the recent high-profile parting of the ways between actor Scarlett Johansson and the global anti-poverty group Oxfam are symptoms of a growing resistance to the Israeli subjugation of the indigenous people of Palestine, and also, to the decades of occupation of land designated by the U.N. as a future state for the Palestinian people.

And with each new BDS headline, the ferocious reaction from the movement’s critics, with Netanyahu and his AIPAC fulminations in the vanguard, has risen exponentially.  I think it’s safe to say BDS is in the “then they fight you” stage.

Some wrongly portray the boycott movement, which is modeled on the boycotts employed against Apartheid South Africa and used in the U.S. civil rights movement, to be an attack on the Israeli people or even on the Jewish people, as a whole. Nothing could be further from the truth. The movement recognizes universal human rights under the law for all people, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or color.

I do not claim to speak on behalf of the BDS movement, yet, as a vocal supporter, and because of my visibility in the music industry, I have become a natural target for those who wish to attack BDS, not by addressing the merits of its claims but, instead, by assigning hateful and racist motivations to BDS supporters like me. It has even been said, cruelly and wrongly, that I am a Nazi and an anti-Semite.

When I remarked in a recent interview on historical parallels, stating that I would not have played Vichy France or Berlin in World War II, it was not my intention to compare the Israelis to Nazis or the Holocaust to the decades-long oppression of the Palestinians.  There is no comparison to the Holocaust.  Nor did I intend or ever wish to compare the suffering of Jews then with the suffering of Palestinians now.  Comparing suffering is a painful, grotesque and diminishing exercise that dishonors the specific memory of all our fallen loved ones.

I believe that the root of all injustice and oppression has always been the same – the dehumanization of the other. It is the obsession with Us and Them that can lead us, regardless of racial or religious identity, into the abyss.

Let us never forget that oppression begets more oppression, and the tree of fear and bigotry bears only bitter fruit. The end of the occupation of Palestine, should we all manage to secure it, will mean freedom for the occupied and the occupiers and freedom from the bitter taste of all those wasted years and lives. And that will be a great gift to the world.

“Ashes and diamonds

Foe and friend

We were all equal

In the end.”

From www.salon.com

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) NY radio interview 1986

This is a radio interview (Scott Muni WNEW Radio New York) with Roger Waters with some questions by phone and talks are about Pink Floyd, Roger solo projects and politics.

Roger Waters & David Gilmour interview 1984

Audio interview The Inside Track with Roger Waters & David Gilmour 10-22-84. The Inside Track interview with Lisa Robinson.

The American University of Rome presents Roger Waters with Honorary Degree

February 19, 2014

Left to right: Provost Thompson, Chairman Battista, Roger Waters and President Hodges

A Doctorate of Humane Letters Honoris Causa Degree was awarded on the 18th of February 2014 to Roger Waters by The American University of Rome. Waters, who was the co-founder, lyricist, and conceptual leader of world famous progressive rock band Pink Floyd, and champion of veteran causes and human rights, was awarded for his contribution to music and for his social activism around the globe.

Accompanied by his wife Laurie Durning and by war veteran and close friend Harry Shindler, Waters was honored his degree before an intimate group of AUR students, veterans, faculty, and staff at the Istituto Italiano Studi Germanici in Rome following attendance of the Anzio commemoration ceremonies for the 70th anniversary of the Allied landings where his father, Eric Fletcher Waters of the 8th Royal Fusiliers, died as he fought to repel a German counter-attack in a battle that changed the course of the Second World War. Mr. Shindler, who also fought in the assault, was key in helping Waters locate the exact spot where his father fell.

Prof. James Walston, left, with WWII veteran of the battle at Anzio, Harry Shindler.

After receiving the Honoris Causa Degree, the social activist gave a short and concise talk directed to AUR students in which he recited a critical poem written in 2004 in light of the re-election of former US President George W. Bush.  He then encouraged AUR students to “make the world a much better place than it is now” and further highlighted his hopes that the current education system would focus on getting students interested in discovering and delivering the real truth about the issues of the world.

Waters then answered questions from AUR students regarding inspiration for his music, his thoughts on education, and his passion for veteran causes and human rights. Particularly, he shared with the audience that he finds the work he does with veterans to be the most rewarding of all. In a moving moment, he said “countries of the world really need to think more critically about the psychological situations they are putting their children in when they ask them to go to war”. The AUR Veterans Club concluded the ceremony by presenting Roger Waters with a Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his father’s ultimate sacrifice and for Waters’ continued outreach to the veteran community.

From www.aur.edu

Recollections on Roger Waters

"AUR was quite magical on Tuesday night.  Awarding Roger Waters  an honorary degree was Harry Schindler’s idea, the 93-year veteran of Anzio who had located where Mr. Waters’ father had fallen on 18 February 1944, seventy years before. Modest and quite unlike a rock star vapidly consumed with fame, I had the fortune to hear Roger speak in public and then to quiz him about his life in private. Like his music, there is an epic dimension to his own history. 

I remember Pink Floyd from the late ‘sixties and I have a sense of ‘one more brick in the wall’, especially from the Berlin concert in 1990. But in all honesty their music passed me by. Now I rather regret this because Roger is a poet telling the particular stories of his generation.

During the question-and-answer session with the students, Waters spoke about being the son of a primary school teacher. He also revealed that he’d spent five years studying to be an architect. These are minor elements in ‘The Wall’. Perhaps more telling was his longer view of his personal history. His grandfather was a coal miner from the Durham pits who was called up to be a sapper. He died at Arras in the first days of the Somme, leaving a son – Roger’s father, who was aged about three at the time. So the grandfather never knew his son, any more than Roger knew the son, his father. His grandmother went into service and with determination sent her son, Roger’s father, to Durham University where he studied divinity. Eric Fletcher Waters taught at a school in Palestine before the Second World War, and when conscripted, he declared himself to be a pacifist. Driving ambulances in the blitz he met Roger’s mother, already a communist, and with time he decided to enlist. Anzio was the brutal, disorganized end chapter, an Arras in Italy. But of course it wasn’t the end.

The ceremony over, the students became bolder they pushed forward to get his autograph and to photograph him. Their unalloyed joy was quite something to behold! He is quite used to fame, of course, yet you can see that it belongs to a world he left behind long ago. He is focussed instead upon continual reinvention of his musical ideas as opposed to living off the music he made thirty, forty or even nearly fifty years ago. His recent shows have been colossal productions, possibly some of the largest grossing extravaganzas in rock history, and in unlikely places – Argentina and Turkey, for example – as well as in more familiar cities. In this new invention, of course, he remains a discomforting political activist, speaking to old and new audiences alike. The undisguised honesty sustains a personal story that encompasses Arras and Anzio, and, in some way, was shaped by architecture school.

This honorary degree ceremony, like so many before at AUR, shed a spotlight on the importance of education in the world today. It also emphasized unexpectedly the place of history in a portfolio of popular music that will forever be associated with the great social changes of the baby-boomers from the 1960s through to the end of the cold war."

—Richard Hodges

From www.aur.edu