A Choice this Christmas? – By Roger Waters

Outspoken activistic and instrumentalist Roger Waters. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

By Roger Waters

Truth and Love oregon Lies and Hate?

Every morning, noon, and night, I person to delete a fewer notifications of caller subscribers to my abbreviated Substack stack. My caller subscribers liked the caller work of my email speech with Thom Yorke of Radiohead from backmost successful 2017. It seems it cleared a fewer things up for them. Good. Let’s wide up a fewer more.

The genocide and taste cleansing of the indigenous radical of Palestine by the murderous authorities of Israel, aided, abetted, and financed by the Western Empire, takes my enactment distant to the constituent wherever I tin hardly write. My manus shakes, my thorax is tight, my enactment comes successful fits and starts, and my eyes blur with tears of compassion, rage, and disbelief. I americium thousands of miles from the nearest stiff, cold, dormant child. I haven’t heard a azygous gunshot, oregon smelled the faintest whiff of putrefaction from the rotting bodies of mums and dads and uncles and aunts and cousins and grandpas and sisters and brothers nether the rubble, and yet…?

Maybe I’ve got PTSD.

“Calm down, you lanky prick!”

I shingle my head, to wide it momentarily of my agony. I thought we had each agreed.

“Never again.”

I thought erstwhile our leaders signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights connected December 10th, 1948, successful Paris, enshrining its 30 articles successful law, they each meant to abide by it. But I was wrong. Not each of them meant to abide by it. Some of them were telling porkie pies, weren’t they, Thom? Some of them had their manicured fingers crossed down their backs, didn’t they, Thom?

It was a spot similar July 4th, 1776, successful Philadelphia, wasn’t it? The Declaration of Independence:

“We clasp these truths to beryllium self-evident, that each men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with definite inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When we work the past of the American Revolution, we assumed these inalienable rights to which the founding fathers referred were meant to widen to brownish people, didn’t we, Thom? Like African Americans, oregon Native Americans, oregon Palestinians?

I accidental it is conscionable imaginable that the founding fathers believed what they declared, but it seems hardly credible, fixed that past shows america that their attachment to the fundamentally European conception of achromatic supremacy and settler colonialism has, for the past 240 years, overridden the supposedly inalienable rights of anyone of non-European lineage who stood oregon stands successful their mode of what they judge to beryllium their manifest destiny.

This evidently includes the forty oregon 50 cardinal oregon truthful indigenous Native Americans who stood successful their mode successful 1776, not to notation the African slaves shipped successful to marque the achromatic man’s fortunes, oregon currently, the 7 cardinal indigenous Palestinians who are truthful heroically lasting successful absorption to support their autochthonal land.

Let’s permission speech the genocide of the Native Americans for the infinitesimal and absorption connected the ongoing genocide successful Palestine.

So, Thom? Sorry, Thom, I’d astir forgotten you. Chance would beryllium a good thing, wouldn’t it, Thom? Do I dependable angry, Thom? Well, good spotted, Thom. I am. Can I inquire you a question, Thom? Do you ain a smartphone? If you do, you can’t assertion ignorance, tin you? Or are you conscionable a sociopath, Thom?

Why are you not manning the barricades with maine and Brian Eno and Ken Loach and Susan Sarandon, howling your outrage alongside ours, astatine Israel and the USA, and the UK and France and Germany and each the remainder of the genocidal, achromatic supremacist, manifest destiny, European cabal?

Or are you conscionable philosophically, emotionally, and politically aligned with each those who signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights successful 1948 with their manicured fingers crossed down their backs?

So, was the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the biggest smirking porkie pastry of the twentieth century, Thom? What bash you think? You look to beryllium dithering a bit, Thom, truthful I’ll reply for you. No, Thom, the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn’t a porky pie. It was a heroic, magnificent effort astatine progress, Thom. It was an look of a planetary tendency to marque a satellite that was amended than it was earlier the 2 World Wars, to extremity each war.

For astir of the signatories, it wasn’t a lie. Most of them believed successful what they were signing. Most of them inactive do. No, Thom, it wasn’t a lie. It was a cosmopolitan look of love, truth, and supra all, anticipation for the aboriginal of mankind. It inactive is, and if we, the people, basal unneurotic unflinching successful our absorption to the genocide, being brought to an iPhone adjacent you, Thom, each day, each day, 24/7, successful each its disgusting detail…

If we do, Thom, and request the implementation of the 30 articles of that declaration from Paris, 1948, nether planetary law, we may—just may—be capable to prevention our precious planet, our home, and each beingness connected it, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, oregon nationality, from extinction.

The satellite Earth, Thom, our home, which, with your connivance, is being inexorably nudged by hateful achromatic supremacist leaders, mainly, but sadly not exclusively, American and Israeli (yes, Sir Keir Starmer, I mean you!). Where was I? Oh yes, hateful achromatic supremacist leaders spewing lies and hatred, garnered from malign past spiritual texts, nudging Planet Earth ever person to its last plunge into the abyss.

Just to beryllium clear, Thom, erstwhile I talk of malign beatified writ—Amalek and Armageddon—were ever a nightmare, Thom, ne'er a dream… adjacent for the chosen few.

Love and truth,

R.

PS: I connect a song.

Crystal Clear Brooks

When the clip comes

And the past time dawns

And the aerial of the piper warms

The precocious crags of the aged country

When the beatified writ blows

Like burned insubstantial away

And omniscient men concede

That there’s much than 1 way

More than 1 path

More than 1 book

More than 1 fisherman

More than 1 hook

When the cats person each been skinned

And the food person been hooked

When the masters of war

Are our masters nary more

When aged friends instrumentality their whiskey

Outside connected the porch

Raise a solid to their comrades

Who carried the torches

We volition person done well

If we’re capable to say

As the prima settles down

On that last day

That we ne'er gave in

That we did each we could

So the kids could spell fishing

In crystal wide brooks

Crystal Clear Brooks c. Roger Waters

(Live show of Crystal Clear Brooks with the men of Musicorps astatine The Daughters of the American Revolution Hall, Washington DC, November 2015. It was a large night! It was called Music Heals. It does. We were joined that nighttime connected the barricades by Tom Morello, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, G.E. Smith, and Jeff Kazee, among others. Thank you, comrades all. Love and truth. R.)