Roger Waters, Two 9/11 Anniversaries, The War On Terror, And What Are You Going To Do About It?

In this YouTube clip, Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd), talking with Afshin Rattansi (of RT), reflects on two vital turning points in contemporary history, both of which occurred on the 11th of September. He speaks of not only the well-known 2001 attacks in the U.S. but also (and very movingly) about the lesser-known 1973 coup in Chile, which ushered in Augusto Pinochet and his reign of terror, to the horror of the whole world ... except of course for the American people, whose government sponsored the coup, and who live in a bubble which news of this sort cannot penetrate.

At the end of the interview, Waters mangles one of the least consequential details of the U.S. political system (how many states?), but still cuts to the heart of the matter:

We still need to hold on to the idea that we, the people, actually have the right to live in peace.

This endless war [bleep] ... is not working for any of us, except ... people invested in the military industrial complex, who are making ... trillions of dollars. It's a way of taxing ordinary people, because the money ... taken from the taxes of ordinary working people ... [is] divvied out amongst all the people who invest in defense. They protect them by spreading them out ... so every State in the Union has got a little bit of the war industry. And in consequence most of their representatives in Congress ... come under pressure from their little bits of the arms industry, not to cut military spending ... and in consequence a huge proportion of the tax revenue of the United States Government goes into perpetual war.