VENICE, Sept 7 — Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters branded British prime minister Boris Johnson a dangerous “sociopath” yesterday.
The singer said Johnson and other populist leaders like Donald Trump are hell-bent on destroying the planet as a movie of his latest world tour, Us + Them — which highlighted the plight of migrants — was premiered at the Venice film festival.
He said that like Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Johnson and Trump had embarked on “a wilful quest to destroy this beautiful planet on which we live.
“If we do not resist the neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces that are tearing the planet apart there will not be anything left for our children and their children,” the veteran star declared.
British-born Waters, a long-time supporter of left-wing causes, told AFP that Johnson “fits all the fascist paradigms. He is a larger-than-life buffoon totally uninterested in anything beyond how can he can get power.
“Fascism is always an unholy alliance between the ruling and the corporate class with the popular support of the uneducated mass. That is what is happening in the UK at the moment,” he insisted.
Nevertheless, Waters said he would gladly sit down with Trump, Johnson or Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage “if such a meeting would bear fruit. I am a great believer of the stone dropped in the well... and the ripple that might do some good.”
But the writer of such classic protest songs as The Wall said none of the wave of populist leaders across Europe were capable of feeling “for a fellow human being.
“You either have love in your heart or you don’t,” he told AFP.
‘No love in their hearts’
“[Matteo] Salvini has no love in his heart,” Waters added, in a swipe at Italy’s former far-right interior minister. “Neither does Boris Johnson, neither does Donald Trump,” he said.
“They are heartless sociopaths. So they shouldn’t be taken seriously by ordinary human beings.”
Waters had earlier told reporters that Trump’s and Johnson’s divisive brand of politics was “succeeding in keeping ordinary people at each other’s throats.”
He said the appeal of Trump and other populists was based on fear. “They are amusing and they give (their supporters) permission to be complete arseholes.
“It pumps them up” and tells them “that they are better than the blacks and the brown people and anybody who lives in Mexico. However poor you are, you are superior to them,” he said.
The 76-year-old said so many young fans had flocked to his concerts because “most popular music is entirely devoid of meaning and emotion. They recognise the truth” in the firebrand lyrics of his songs about US drone strikes and the growing gap between rich and poor.
Earlier at a highly charged press conference, Waters voiced his support for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who he said would probably be killed for revealing US atrocities in Iraq.
He also claimed that Brazil’s jailed former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva — or Lula — had been framed on corruption charges and that the “powers that be” had done everything in their power to undermine “Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela”. — AFP
