Don’t Call Roger Waters of Pink Floyd “Pink”

Pink is a pejorative in the historical lexicon.

I never have, and do not now, belong to or follow as a fellow traveler any of the organizations on J. Edgar Hoover’s red hate list. Yet I confess to being pink, and a qualified admirer of the Old Left. Not the New Left which  accomplished great things like Northern students marching South for black rights in the early sixties, but has now congealed into a dogmatic, soon-to-be-geriatric orthodoxy on college campuses.

I mean the Old Left. In terms of my historical opinion, I’m an admirer of the Popular Front, the radical-liberal movement of the 1930s and 1940s that many dismissed, then and later, and not without cause, as a Front Group for the American Communist Party. The ACP had an awful blind spot: its failure to speak out against the Soviet Communist Party which had an obsession that started with a vendetta against “Zionists” and ended with Stalin’s anti-Semitic though abortive conspiracy theory of a “Doctors’ Plot.”

The joke is that: “Mrs. Lincoln, aside from John Wilkes Booth’s extempore performance, how did you like the play?” I think, however, the joke does not apply to the ACP whose championing of mass production unionism, the civil rights movement, and the anti-Hitler crusade—yes, despite the disgraceful two years of the 1939-1941 Hitler-Stalin Pact—were and are reasons for pride. The ACP also functioned as an effective assimilatory mechanism for Jewish immigrants and their descendants, and the Popular Front inspired directly or indirectly some of the best twentieth-century American films including film noir.

It’s nigh impossible to square the circle, but the ACP’s attempts to square “anti-Zionism” with strong support for Jewish rights was mostly sincere and as successful as such a quixotic enterprise could be.

This is why I denounce Roger Waters’ of Pink Floyd’s cooptation of “pink.” Waters' latest shot in a letter to Salon is at rocker Jon Bon Jovi whom Waters accuses of standing “shoulder to shoulder” with “the settler who burned the baby,” referring to the arsonists, thought to be Jewish extremists, who firebombed a Palestinian home in August, killing a toddler and several family members, an act condemned by Israel’s leaders who have their hands full trying to respond to an epidemic of Palestinian terrorist murders of innocent Jews which Waters deigns to ignore. Previously, the BDSer Waters' anti-Israel vitriol included dismissing in a conspiratorialist anti-Semitic magazine, Counterpunch, of Israeli concerns about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran’s mad mullahs as “a huge bucket of crap that they are pouring into the mouth of a gullible public . . . It’s a diversionary tactic.” All Bon Jovi did was praise the Holy Land as a wonderful place where three great religions originated, and expressed his hope to visit some unspecified tourist sites after his concert. There was a time when American leftists would have consecended Bon Jovi's statement as tepid praise for Israel.

A few years before an Islamist shooter targeted Brussels’ Jewish Museum, Waters provided advance PR by floating over a concert in Belgium his “pig float” conflating the Star of David with the swastika.

If Waters’ float had been the PA flag inscribed “For A Free Palestine” (a problematic slogan, in my view), I would not have called it anti-Semitic. However, his equating the Star of David with the swastika occurred at roughly the same time that marchers in ear shot of Anne Frank House in Amsterdam were shouting “Jews to the gas.”

It echoes further back to loudmouthed psychopaths who marched in brown shirts—not pink. Strip away the protective ideological coloration, and Waters’ true colors are not pink.