With US President Donald Trump preparing to square off with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 race, Americans might as well be choosing between Orwell and Huxley, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters told RT.
Though the current US president is a “failed landlord” who somehow managed to become “the most powerful man in the Western world,” Biden, his likely rival, does not present a better option, Waters said in an interview with Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador who now hosts a show on RT Spanish.
“There’s no choice to be made by the American people, this is why the idea that the United States is a democracy is such a sham,” Waters said, adding that the Democratic Party ruined any chance for a real alternative when it “crushed” the Bernie Sanders campaign, as the socialist senator would not serve the interests of “the people who actually run the country” – Wall Street and the “war machine.”
But the “most dangerous thing” in the current political moment, Waters argued, is “propaganda” which seeks to transform “the truth” into an “extreme point of view,” citing the vicious treatment of WikiLeaks co-founder and anti-secrecy crusader Julian Assange as an example.
There’s been a debate continuing about which dystopia our current world is more like, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ or George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ But the one thing that is common… is propaganda, it’s the Ministry of Truth
Beyond the political system, US healthcare has also left many Americans with few options, with crippling medical bills a leading cause of middle-class bankruptcies, even amid the Covid-19 outbreak.
“New York has been terrible, but you would expect it because there’s no health service in the United States of America,” Waters said. “Well, there is a health service, but it’s only for the very wealthy, and in consequence they’re completely unprepared to face something like this.”
The US has long been the world’s top coronavirus hotspot, counting nearly 1.3 million cases of the illness and more than 77,000 fatalities. Though the country boasts more intensive care beds per capita than much of the world, the healthcare systems of the hardest-hit areas – such as New York and New Jersey – have strained under the pandemic. At some hospitals in New York City, federal agencies and even the military have stepped in to deploy refrigerated mobile morgue trucks just to cope with the surge of deaths from the virus.
Even as new medicines are developed to combat the pathogen, around one in seven Americans say they would be unable to afford treatment, according to a recent Gallup poll, leaving tens of millions of citizens largely helpless during a major health crisis.
On a more optimistic note, the rockstar said greater numbers of people are taking notice of corrupt political leaders and their media allies, not only in the United States but around the world, predicting that protests will again erupt in the streets once the pandemic crisis dies down, especially across Latin America.
“So there is a light. It’s a long, narrow tunnel, but there is more than a pinprick of light,” he continued. “The walls of the tunnel are crumbling, because the people are demanding it.”
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