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Fun fact: if you go to this song’s Genius page, the line, And every time a student gets run over by a tank, is annotated to be about Tinyman Tank Man
It is in fact about Rachel Corrie, who was fatally crushed by an Israeli tank in 2003
Fuck it, here’s a link in case anyone wants to interact with it
I already knew that and I find it abnormal how a Mandela Effect is among the liberals that the man in Tinyman’s Square was crushed by the tank, only he was only taken out of the way.
Whoever wrote the Genius annotation admitted that he wasn’t harmed, but Roger’s criticizing Bad Authoritarians so he must mean China
Nevermind that Israel, arguably Waters’ main political topic, actually did crush a student with a tank in Palestine
ETA Oh my god, the annotation suggestion that mentions Corrie has been marked as a stretch
And I would call his interpretation of “Watching TV” over simplistic, it’s a song that has the fucking verses:
Her grandpa fought old Chiang Kai-shek//
That no-good low-down dirty rat
Who used to order his troops
To fire on the women and children
Imagine that imagine that
And in the spring of '48
Mao Tse-tung got quite irate
And he kicked that old dictator Chiang
Out of the state of China
Chiang Kai-shek came down in Formosa
And they armed the island of Quemoy
And the shells were flying across the China Sea
And they turned Formosa into a shoe factory
Called Taiwan
Instead of being an empty critique of authoritarianism, I consider this song much more a sincere lament of the direction that China was taking in the years of Deng given past history. A criticism that can be disagreed but that has its background of truth.
Oh wow, I didn’t know about that one. I knew that Waters had been very vocal about Israel and - wherever I’ve seen him anyway - has been much cooler than I’ve expected from a fairly old rock star. I didn’t know he was out there dropping direct historical narratives, though. I’ll have to listen closer next time I try one of his albums
All I want from him politically is pretty much what he already does: being anti-imperialist in a way that refers to our global empire rather than like, “it was imperialistic of you to eat the last funyun without asking”
