© Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Speaking to Sophie Shevardnadze, Pink Floyd's former frontman said that those who say he should "stick to music" were "sleepwalking" when it came to conflicts like the Syrian civil war and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
"Because they're asleep. Because they're the victims of the neoliberalism that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought to the world," Waters said.
Neoliberalism's pervasiveness through Western culture and politics, in Waters' view, has left many people with the inability to see and accept anything critical of the mainstream narrative.
"Part of the way it works is to anaesthetise people and almost make it uncomfortable for people to see anything real."
For Waters the root of this antipathy, in the US at least, lies in part from its poorly funded public education system. In Waters' view the reason for this lies in the political establishment's desire to keep an ignorant and compliant population.
"They want to keep the electorate ignorant, and mindless, and unthinking, and malleable, and pliable, and very open to the use of consumerism and propaganda to keep them under control, to maintain the Orwellian notion of the sheep and whatever."
Mainstream media consumption is another factor given by Waters for this outlook. Citing the "scripted, carefully shot" documentary on the White Helmets, and the group's dubious claims of a Syrian government gas attack in the city of Douma, Waters said the MSM isn't "interested in telling you anything about anything."
"You know, it's so obvious now that CNN and all of them are all the same, from MSNBC to Fox and everything in between," he said after pointing out the lack of coverage in the West after an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report found no evidence of chemical weapons in Douma.
"Their narrative is that there was a chemical attack and the White Helmets are wonderful."
One US channel to escape Waters' ire was Discovery, describing it as the "one little piece of TV in the United States where you can occasionally get a glimpse of reality of what it's like to be human."
"The rest is just propaganda," he added.
Reader Comments
The answer to an inescapable conflict (and I mean inescapable in the sense of self contradictory), is to deny it by seeing something ELSE. This projected conflict provides the basis for the bubble of self-illusion or self seduction under the illusion of power, and so it is maintained at all and cost by all who are invested in such illusion of power.
That Roger has woken to some grim and indeed disturbing truths about our world, is part of his willingness and capacity to look at it, and live with it as part of conscious awareness rather than under the radar or meeting a blind eye.
The attempt to put and keep Jack in the box not only gives him power to break out in the manner of his own denials, as well as setting or framing the agenda of powers and protections that become rackets, but take all energy and attention away from the real need - the original need that the self-contradicting conflict interjects between who you are and what you think and act as if you are.
The idea of course is that we are each AND together in patterns of entanglement by which we seek to change others or the outside effect to our thinking and perceiving - instead of accepting the undoing of a change that isn't true - but which we run on and live from as 'reality'.
The desire to wake is not the desire to wake into hell! But the desire to be free of it. Hiding under the blankets and seeking any way to hit the snooze button and keep the dream of a separated from unconscious self, is to persist in self contradictory and dissociative wishing instead of accepting and aligning in true willing. Doing what we truly want cannot be a coercion upon ourself. It is the jack in the box idea that tries to reject reality that opens into the experience of rejection, compression and subjection. Give only as we would in truth receive - and receive or accept only that which we may in truth extend.
The contortions and distortions of the means to maintain illusion are of a purpose you need not share, once you see that it does not serve who you truly are to hide from truth - and your would not want to, even if you could.