The former Pink Floyd member’s support for Palestinian human rights and calls for peace negotiations in Ukraine have long garnered a litany of demagogic critics. Started out as a rock idol - ended up as a rock bottom,” the official account of the Ukrainian government tweeted at the Twitter account of the Israeli government. The official Twitter accounts of the states of Israel and Ukraine have amplified them with surreal, juvenile tweets: “Roger Waters. The campaign against Waters was not just the work of low-level, hate-mongering trolls who have come to define everyone’s user experience online. Now even politicians and law enforcement are taking them up. What is especially troubling is how quickly these claims made it into mainstream media with little fact-checking. That false claims are being made about Waters is not the only disturbing aspect of this episode. Waters’s performance made clear Frank was the victim of the Nazi genocide because of her Jewish identity. This did not occur during the part of his concert that satirizes a fascist rally. Waters featured the name of Anne Frank in a montage of individuals murdered by state actors, in many cases due to racial prejudice. A review of videos of the performance reveal they are not even the same color as the balloon Waters used in Berlin.Ĭlaims that Waters insulted Anne Frank are simply a malicious lie. Waters’s performances have up to this point always been understood as condemning, not exalting, fascism.Īs for the balloon, as left-wing British writer Alex Nunns has pointed out, the photographs purporting to show an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it are not from Waters’s Berlin performance. Since the band’s 1980 tour for The Wall, Waters’s performances have featured a theatrical element in which he assumes the role of a fictional fascist demagogue (the uniform that critics claimed was a literal SS uniform has now been demoted to merely a “Nazi-style costume”) this was true of his 1990 historic performance in Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then there’s the matter of what actually happened at his concerts. As a result, anti-fascist and antiwar sentiment has been a continuous motif of his work at least since Pink Floyd’s 1973 single “Us and Them.” Such themes also feature heavily on Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall. When he was just five months old, his father was killed by Nazis while fighting with the British Army during World War II. The central claims against Waters, however, are a mixture of distortions and outright falsehoods.

Waters’s critics are citing this as proof that his criticisms of Israel’s apartheid government are rooted not in support for the Palestinians, but in antisemitism. That this alleged spectacle took place in the former capital of the Third Reich only makes it more sinister. As part of their campaign against him, they’re now disseminating claims that, during the Berlin performances, Waters dressed up as a Nazi SS officer while disrespecting the memory of Anne Frank and those who died in the Holocaust - all while flying a pig balloon emblazoned with a Jewish Star of David. If you’ve been on social media lately, you’ve possibly seen outraged claims about Roger Waters’s recent performances in Berlin.

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