SOAD’s SERJ TANKIAN: ‘We Can No Longer Withstand Stupid Leadership’

Serj Tankian

SYSTEM OF A DOWN singer Serj Tankian spoke about the importance of focusing on the right issues in the particularly hot political climate the world is in right now.

“There’s not a lot of reasonable leaders left,” Serj said during a June 14 interview with Vahe Berberian Live. “I was thinking of [Germany’s] Angela Merkel being one of the few. Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, and [Armenia’s prime minster] Nikol Pashinyan, he’s reasonable. But there’s a lot of leaders that are unreasonable. And it’s kind of interesting because — I hate to put it this way, but if you look at the top 10 countries with the highest coronavirus infections, it’s a lot of countries with unreasonable leadership, or inadequate leadership.

“And it’s a scary thing to see, how one is affecting the other and how it could affect so many people’s lives, innocent lives taken. It’s really a horrible human tragedy in that sense. And there are people to blame, obviously. But that’s not the important thing.

“I think there’s a lot of polarization happening in the United States politically,” he continued. “I think it’s gone really crazy, [and] it’s dangerous. We’ve come to a time to where, coming out of this lockdown and looking at this lockdown and what it’s taught us, what we’ve seen through it, we’ve come to a place where we can no longer withstand stupid leadership, we can no longer withstand brutal, oppressive leadership anywhere in the world.

“We don’t have time for that,” Tankian added. “Our civilization, based on unsustainable constant economic growth, will not last the way that it is, with our exploding, accelerated population rate. So we have to rein in our consumption. We don’t have time for f*cking brutal leaders. We don’t have time for the King of Saudi Arabia, and we don’t have time for this [Turkish president Recep TayyipErdogan. There’s just not enough time to deal with them and the climate issue. So they’ve gotta go — they’ve all gotta go.”