Mayday Rescue Foundation

• “I will not be cancelled,” roared the former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters at a recent concert in Birmingham, part of a European tour mired in controversy.
• There have been police investigations in Berlin, demonstrations in Britain and accusations of fostering hatred against Jews, but Waters has remained defiant.
• At the centre of the uproar has been onstage imagery, particularly an SS-style leather trenchcoat emblazoned with quasi-fascist crossed hammer symbols which Waters has worn while brandishing a prop machine gun.

An increasingly strident position

• Context is key, particularly Waters’ political trajectory since recording The Wall, and stances that have become progressively more strident and extreme.
• Although anti-war themes have infused his writing since his earliest compositions in the late 1960s, his anti-capitalism and critique of western imperialism have taken on an increasingly conspiratorial bent, overshadowing any message of peace.
• Animals was based on George Orwell’s anti-Stalinist fable Animal Farm, which Waters reconfigured into a commentary on how industrial capitalism had debilitated British society.
• But Orwell – himself no fan of capitalism or imperialism – was alive to the risks of giving succour to your enemy’s enemy.

Veering towards conspiracy theories

• Charges of antisemitism land more heavily in light of all this recent controversial commentary from Waters.
• While criticism of Israel is of course not necessarily antisemitic, that doesn’t mean, as he appears to contend, that it can’t be.
• He may be right that the origins of his show lie in antifascism, but not in assuming that’s the end of the matter.