Ukrainian Socialists Have A Bone To Pick With Lefties In The West.

[CumbrianLefty]

"Tankies" are annoying but have zero representation in government and certainly zero influence on policy direction in America or almost any other Western country

They are massively over-represented online, though.

[Alben Barkley]

Roger Waters is the poster child of this phenomenon of "lefties" and "pacifists" suddenly becoming authoritarian fascists/tankies when it comes to Russia/Ukraine. At absolute best, they are cowardly appeasers who should have learned from Chamberlain. At worst, they expose themselves as really not caring about tyranny and violence and genocide at all as long as the perpetrator is not friendly to the US.

As a someone who loves Pink Floyd it’s been a punch to the guy but the rest of the band has been really based on the issue

Waters has always been a strange man, though.

Don't forget, it was he who voted Tory at the 2005 GE as a protest after Labour banned hunting.

I know he was bizarrely furious about the fox hunting ban, but I never heard he voted Tory over it. (I know he posted on Twitter about voting for Corbynite Labour; big shocker that one old bitter anti-semitic far leftist voted for another of course.) I DID hear the ban is part of the reason he moved to the US. Which apparently he hates more than any place on Earth despite choosing to live here...

I also remember an interview he did a few years back with Dan Rather in which he insisted he was not actually a pacifist, that if another Hitler ever came about he'd be the first to take up arms and fight him. Well... We've seen now how true that is. Very sad and shameful to me, as Waters will always be one of my childhood heroes and a man who played a considerable part in shaping me as I am today. But I simply can't do anything but disavow him now and feel incredibly ashamed about his nasty bigotry and hatred and authoritarian instincts he's shown recently. "The lunatic is on the grass," so to speak. "Shine on you crazy diamond..." I could go on, but suffice it to say he's now crazier than Syd ever was. Oh well, I'll try to remember the good parts when he's gone and pretend these last few years never happened. It sounds f--ked up, but honestly? For the sake of his legacy, he would have been better off dying some time ago.

Also, I'm sorry for this and I know it will piss some people off, but there is no "rest of the band" to me. Roger Waters has always been the answer to "which one's Pink?" He is the guy who made the band what it was, the reason they were one of the biggest and greatest bands of all-time. There's a reason they were a complete joke in the couple albums they did without him. The Wall is my all-time favorite album, and that's 99.9% Waters. I tried to listen to the pro-Ukraine song "the rest of the band" did but literally couldn't even finish it. Waters IS the band to me, which makes it so much harder to simply make a clean break from him. I prefer his voice, certainly his lyrics and songwriting (by orders of magnitude), and his musical vision to Gilmour's and the rest. He's the whole appeal of the band in the first place to me, which is why this Ukraine garbage feels like such a betrayal and stab in the back.

[Hindsight was 2020]

Roger Waters is the poster child of this phenomenon of "lefties" and "pacifists" suddenly becoming authoritarian fascists/tankies when it comes to Russia/Ukraine. At absolute best, they are cowardly appeasers who should have learned from Chamberlain. At worst, they expose themselves as really not caring about tyranny and violence and genocide at all as long as the perpetrator is not friendly to the US.

As a someone who loves Pink Floyd it’s been a punch to the guy but the rest of the band has been really based on the issue

Waters has always been a strange man, though.

Don't forget, it was he who voted Tory at the 2005 GE as a protest after Labour banned hunting.

I know he was bizarrely furious about the fox hunting ban, but I never heard he voted Tory over it. (I know he posted on Twitter about voting for Corbynite Labour; big shocker that one old bitter anti-semitic far leftist voted for another of course.) I DID hear the ban is part of the reason he moved to the US. Which apparently he hates more than any place on Earth despite choosing to live here...

I also remember an interview he did a few years back with Dan Rather in which he insisted he was not actually a pacifist, that if another Hitler ever came about he'd be the first to take up arms and fight him. Well... We've seen now how true that is. Very sad and shameful to me, as Waters will always be one of my childhood heroes and a man who played a considerable part in shaping me as I am today. But I simply can't do anything but disavow him now and feel incredibly ashamed about his nasty bigotry and hatred and authoritarian instincts he's shown recently. "The lunatic is on the grass," so to speak. "Shine on you crazy diamond..." I could go on, but suffice it to say he's now crazier than Syd ever was. Oh well, I'll try to remember the good parts when he's gone and pretend these last few years never happened. It sounds f--ked up, but honestly? For the sake of his legacy, he would have been better off dying some time ago.

Also, I'm sorry for this and I know it will piss some people off, but there is no "rest of the band" to me. Roger Waters has always been the answer to "which one's Pink?" He is the guy who made the band what it was, the reason they were one of the biggest and greatest bands of all-time. There's a reason they were a complete joke in the couple albums they did without him. The Wall is my all-time favorite album, and that's 99.9% Waters. I tried to listen to the pro-Ukraine song "the rest of the band" did but literally couldn't even finish it. Waters IS the band to me, which makes it so much harder to simply make a clean break from him. I prefer his voice, certainly his lyrics and songwriting (by orders of magnitude), and his musical vision to Gilmour's and the rest. He's the whole appeal of the band in the first place to me, which is why this Ukraine garbage feels like such a betrayal and stab in the back.

Well you have to have proper context for his quote. He’s saying that because that what his dad was like. His dad was a dedicated pacifist that was against entering WW2 but eventually Hitler got so out of control that he couldn’t stand by any longer….which isn’t wrong about his dad but an unbelievably generous interpretation. The truth is his dad was an open communist and like most communist spent the start of WW2 talking about it the same way our resident vatniks or the tankies the article do: “both sides are equally to blame” “I don’t support Hitler but if you were Germany you’d do the same thing”, “Hitler is wrong but this war is really the capitalist Wests fault”. A like all the other communist living in the UK and other Western countries the thing that Hitler did to cause the opinion shift was attacking the Soviet Union. My point being that to “leftist” like Roger what defines the evilness of Hitler wasn’t the Holocaust or wars of aggression but attacking the heart of the people’s revolution. So long point short, people like Roger would see how evil Putin’s war is if Zelensky was an open commie.

[Alben Barkley]

Roger Waters is the poster child of this phenomenon of "lefties" and "pacifists" suddenly becoming authoritarian fascists/tankies when it comes to Russia/Ukraine. At absolute best, they are cowardly appeasers who should have learned from Chamberlain. At worst, they expose themselves as really not caring about tyranny and violence and genocide at all as long as the perpetrator is not friendly to the US.

As a someone who loves Pink Floyd it’s been a punch to the guy but the rest of the band has been really based on the issue

Waters has always been a strange man, though.

Don't forget, it was he who voted Tory at the 2005 GE as a protest after Labour banned hunting.

I know he was bizarrely furious about the fox hunting ban, but I never heard he voted Tory over it. (I know he posted on Twitter about voting for Corbynite Labour; big shocker that one old bitter anti-semitic far leftist voted for another of course.) I DID hear the ban is part of the reason he moved to the US. Which apparently he hates more than any place on Earth despite choosing to live here...

I also remember an interview he did a few years back with Dan Rather in which he insisted he was not actually a pacifist, that if another Hitler ever came about he'd be the first to take up arms and fight him. Well... We've seen now how true that is. Very sad and shameful to me, as Waters will always be one of my childhood heroes and a man who played a considerable part in shaping me as I am today. But I simply can't do anything but disavow him now and feel incredibly ashamed about his nasty bigotry and hatred and authoritarian instincts he's shown recently. "The lunatic is on the grass," so to speak. "Shine on you crazy diamond..." I could go on, but suffice it to say he's now crazier than Syd ever was. Oh well, I'll try to remember the good parts when he's gone and pretend these last few years never happened. It sounds f--ked up, but honestly? For the sake of his legacy, he would have been better off dying some time ago.

Also, I'm sorry for this and I know it will piss some people off, but there is no "rest of the band" to me. Roger Waters has always been the answer to "which one's Pink?" He is the guy who made the band what it was, the reason they were one of the biggest and greatest bands of all-time. There's a reason they were a complete joke in the couple albums they did without him. The Wall is my all-time favorite album, and that's 99.9% Waters. I tried to listen to the pro-Ukraine song "the rest of the band" did but literally couldn't even finish it. Waters IS the band to me, which makes it so much harder to simply make a clean break from him. I prefer his voice, certainly his lyrics and songwriting (by orders of magnitude), and his musical vision to Gilmour's and the rest. He's the whole appeal of the band in the first place to me, which is why this Ukraine garbage feels like such a betrayal and stab in the back.

Well you have to have proper context for his quote. He’s saying that because that what his dad was like. His dad was a dedicated pacifist that was against entering WW2 but eventually Hitler got so out of control that he couldn’t stand by any longer….which isn’t wrong about his dad but an unbelievably generous interpretation. The truth is his dad was an open communist and like most communist spent the start of WW2 talking about it the same way our resident vatniks or the tankies the article do: “both sides are equally to blame” “I don’t support Hitler but if you were Germany you’d do the same thing”, “Hitler is wrong but this war is really the capitalist Wests fault”. A like all the other communist living in the UK and other Western countries the thing that Hitler did to cause the opinion shift was attacking the Soviet Union. My point being that to “leftist” like Roger what defines the evilness of Hitler wasn’t the Holocaust or wars of aggression but attacking the heart of the people’s revolution. So long point short, people like Roger would see how evil Putin’s war is if Zelensky was an open commie.

I always heard that his dad was actually a devout Christian, not a communist, and that was in fact why he was a pacifist. Which is ironic considering his son is an atheist and, if not a communist, than very close to one.

I think his dad would actually be ashamed of his son nowadays. Roger has spent his whole life moping endlessly about the fact that his dad died in WW2, and blaming seemingly everyone under the sun for it, ESPECIALLY the Allies/West. "When the Tigers Broke Free" is ultimately a song blasting the King of England for his "daddy" dying, but for all his emoting he at no point actually explains what the "high command" should have done instead of sending men to fight for the "Anzio bridgehead." Just let the Nazis keep Italy? It's something he had no answer for then and has no answer for now. He's been raging against the world for 80 years over the fact that his father died in war, and while I understand the trauma behind that, at some point you have to get over it for one thing, if only for the sake of your own psychological health if nothing else, and for another thing you have to look at the bigger picture of what your father was  actually fighting and dying for. If what I've read in the past is correct, his father was a pacifist Christian who was so shaken by Hitler he ultimately felt he had to disavow his pacifism to stand up for what is right. That was HIS choice. Roger should respect that. And if he's going to blame anybody, it should simply be the Nazis and Hitler and other fascists. Which to his credit, he HAS blamed those types. BUT blaming the West as well for it along with every bad thing that has ever happened since, including things in actuality started by new fascists like Putin? THAT is what makes no sense to me.

[CumbrianLefty]

Again, whilst he has always had "issues", I do think we need to beware of viewing RW's whole life and artistic output though the prism of the 80 year old pro-Russia (and at least borderline AS) crank that he is now.

There were widespread accusations of British incompetence and even callousness as far as the Anzio campaign (where his father perished) is concerned, and of course the son of Commander Waters was well aware of this. Plus as far as WTTBF is concerned, I don't think he "blames" George VI for the war, rather its a dig at the obvious insincerity of his "rubber stamp".

Its one of the most powerful lines in a generally brilliant song IMO (and a lot of his output at that time *was* pretty self-indulgent - Two Suns In The Sunset may just be the most wrist-slittingly depressing thing ever put to vinyl)

Yes it was one of the justest wars ever, and we were the good guys. That doesn't make everything the Allies did beyond criticism, or alter the reality that war is by its very nature horrible and hellish.

So he gets a pass from me tbh. Oh, and I also quite like The Division Bell