Monday, November 4, 2019
Max Blumenthal Arrest Exposes Hypocrisy of Western Media and ‘Human Rights’ NGOs
OCTOBER 30, 2019
Grayzone editor Max
Blumenthal, a prominent journalistic critic of US policy toward
Venezuela, was arrested by DC police on Friday, October 25, in connection
with a protest at the Venezuelan embassy, and held incommunicado. But if you
rely on corporate media, or even leading “press freedom” groups, you haven’t
heard about this troubling encroachment on freedom of the press.
Blumenthal is a bestselling
author whose work has appeared in such publications as the New
York Times, CJR, The Nation and Salon. DC police
arrested him at his home on a five-month-old arrest warrant, charging him with
simple assault for his attempt to deliver food to the besieged Venezuelan
embassy; he was held for two days, and for the first 36 hours was not allowed
to speak with a lawyer. (In an interview with FAIR, Blumenthal noted that
keeping arrestees—generally poor and African-American—from speaking with
lawyers or family is par for the course in the DC criminal justice system.) As
of this writing, there has been no mention of Blumenthal’s arrest in outlets
like the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters that
constantly publish Venezuela-related content, or by the big “press freedom”
NGOs.
When freelance US journalist
Cody Weddle was detained in Venezuela for 12 hours, it made headlines in
the New York Times (3/6/19), Washington
Post (3/6/19), Miami
Herald (3/6/19), USA
Today (3/6/19), Guardian (3/6/19),
UK Telegraph (3/6/19), NPR (3/10/19), ABC (3/9/19)
and Reuters (3/7/19).
That’s not exhaustive, but you get the picture.
In Weddle’s case, the human
rights industry also responded immediately. Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights
Watch tweeted about
Cody Weddle’s detention, as did Reporters without
Borders (RSF). The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also put out
a statement immediately
(3/6/19).
There has been nothing from them about Blumenthal.
The two-hour
detention of Univision’s Jorge Ramos in Venezuela was
likewise big news.
In fact, RSF was outraged that Cody Weddle’s detention happened “barely a week”
after the Ramos incident.
Nobody should have a problem
with Weddle’s arrest or Ramos’ detention getting the widespread attention they
did. (The content in the reports about Venezuela is a separate issue.) What
should anger anybody who isn’t consumed with hypocrisy is the point Ben Norton,
writing in Grayzone (10/28/19),
made about Blumenthal’s arrest:
If this had happened to a
journalist in Venezuela, every Western human rights NGO and news wire would be
howling about Maduro’s authoritarianism. It will be revealing to see how these
same elements react to a clear-cut case of political repression in their own
backyard.
Blumenthal’s arrest is another
example of the legal harassment of US government critics, including WikiLeaks’
Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning–whose plights have similarly
been neglected by Western media and NGOs that claim to support press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/3/18, 4/1/19).
Several months ago, activists
invited by the Venezuela government stayed in
the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC, for over a month until they were
finally evicted by police on May 24. The presence of the activists delayed a
takeover of the embassy by representatives of the Trump-appointed Venezuelan
government-in-exile led by Juan Guaidó. The majority of the world’s governments
do not recognize Guaidó; that was dramatically highlighted on October 17 when
Venezuela’s was voted
onto the UN Human Rights Council despite US “lobbying” (i.e., bribes
and threats).
Nevertheless, Trump’s
recognition of Guaidó in January 2019 was the excuse for intensifying economic
sanctions that had already killed
thousands of people by the end of 2018. (Incidentally, Jorge Ramos’
two-hour “detention” also received more Western media attention than the study
showing the already-lethal impact of Trump’s sanctions—FAIR.org, 6/14/19).
With the complicity of DC
police, Guaidó supporters tried to block food from being delivered to the
embassy during the standoff with the activists. At one point, 78-year-old Jesse
Jackson Sr. had to
scuffle with Guaidó supporters to deliver food. The DC police were
clearly intent on doing as little as possible, even with an elderly,
high-profile visitor trying to make a delivery. Former Green Party
candidate Ajamu Baraka (age
66) was forced to act as Jackson’s bodyguard, thanks to the aggression of
Guaidó supporters and the inaction of DC police.
Norton reported:
Court documents indicate the
false charge of simple assault stems from Blumenthal’s participation in a
delivery of food and sanitary supplies to peace activists and journalists
inside the Venezuelan embassy on May 8, 2019.
Others attempting to deliver
food were hit with charges months ago. Activist Ben Rubenstein and Veterans
for Peace president Gary Condon (age 72) were beaten by police during
the standoff for trying to toss a cucumber to activists inside the embassy. In
fact, the warrant against Blumenthal was months old, and apparently initially
rejected. Blumenthal explained:
If the government had at least
told me I had a warrant I could have voluntarily surrendered and appeared at my
own arraignment…. Instead, the federal government essentially enlisted the DC
police to SWAT me, ensuring that I would be subjected to an early morning raid
and then languish in prison for days without even the ability to call an
attorney.
The lack of coverage of his
arrest “is totally consistent with media coverage of the siege of the
Venezuelan embassy,” Blumenthal told FAIR. “The violence, racism, sexism of the
Venezuelan opposition—none of it was reported in the mainstream US press.”
Aside from alternative outlets like Democracy Now! (10/30/19)
and the World Socialist Website (10/30/19),
one had to turn to Russian
state media to find coverage of Blumenthal’s arrest. A Sputnik article
(10/30/19)
about the case cited damaging exposés Grayzone has
published about Guaidó inner circle, one of which recently led to the resignation of
right-wing economist Ricardo Hausmann from Guaidó’s shadow administration.
Here’s an idea for media
outlets and NGOs concerned about
the appeal of Russian public relations efforts: start doing your jobs by
holding your own authoritarian politicians and politicized police forces to
account.
Nazi-Normalizing Barf Journalism: A Brief History
NOVEMBER 1, 2019
In the beginning was the
profile of the Nazi next door, an inexplicable decision by the New York
Times (11/25/17)
to profile a right-wing extremist in the most sympathetic light possible. It
was the most outrageous example of an outrageous genre of MSM—and particularly
NYT—reporting: the never-ending effort to profile, study, explain, excuse and
rationalize Trump voters. Without, of course, referring to them as racists.
White men are always news that’s fit to print.
The article was met with howls
of protest across Twitter, but among the many apt responses, Bess Kalb’s
description (11/25/17)
captured my heart and gave me the single most useful phrase of the Trump era:
“Nazi-normalizing barf journalism.”
I don't mean to sound
intolerant or coarse, but fuck this Nazi and fuck the gentle, inquisitive tone
of this Nazi normalizing barf journalism, and fuck the photographer for not
just throwing the camera at this Nazi's head and laughing. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nationalist.html?_r=0 …
Again and again during Trump’s
presidency, corporate media have fallen over themselves to find acceptable ways
to describe utterly unacceptable behavior, policies and decisions—none more so
than the New York Times. In every era, the Times’ center of gravity
has been the legitimation of power, and the Trump era is no different. The
paper’s obvious disdain for Donald Trump is continually cloaked in
rationalizing headlines and descriptions. It’s as if they can’t help
themselves—the stability of US institutions is more important than their
integrity, and so they must normalize what should never be normalized.
Just three examples:
“Trump’s Embrace of Racially
Charged Past Puts Republicans in Crisis” (8/16/17):
This headline refers to Trump’s “very fine people” defense of neo-Nazis at the
Charlottesville white supremacist rally where James Fields drove a car into a
crowd of protesters, killing one (Heather Heyer) and injuring dozens, many
seriously. “Racially charged past” = Confederate monuments celebrating the
defense of chattel slavery.
“Ocasio-Cortez Calls Migrant
Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps,’ Eliciting Backlash” (6/18/19):
The headline suggests that the veracity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
description is up for debate, when, in fact, it is simply
accurate terminology. Indeed, the subsequent rise of #JewsAgainstICE
underscored that truth with the particular credibility that Jewish people bring
to conversations about ethnic cleansing. The Times chose to cover the
moment as a “she said, she said” debate between liberal Democrats like
Ocasio-Cortez and Republicans like Liz Cheney.
After a Green Bay rally
(4/27/19) in which Trump called the media “sick people” and the officials he’s
forced out of government “scum,” and accused Democrats of supporting
infanticide (Vox, 4/29/19),
the Times put out a tweet (4/28/19)
saying that with the infanticide charge, “Trump revived an inaccurate refrain.”
You get the idea.
All of it is Nazi-normalizing
barf journalism. In wrapping human rights abuses, lawbreaking, lies,
corruption, cruelty, racism, misogyny and other abhorrent dimensions of the
Trump administration in the familiar language and themes of Washington
politics, the Times is actively helping stabilize the regime. We read
these headlines and think “business as usual” rather than “this is intolerable,
I must act.”
In a recent example I find
particularly troubling, the New York Times (10/13/19)
reported on a video
meme mashup, shown at a pro-Trump conference at one of Trump’s resorts in
early October, showing Trump massacring members of the media and political
opponents.
In an era where both hate
crimes and domestic terrorism (including mass shootings) are rising at an
alarming rate, the celebration of violence in the name of the Trump brand is a
disturbing escalation in the normalization of political violence.
Trump has long invited his
followers to violence. On the campaign trail, he promised to pay legal costs if
his supporters beat up protesters, and advocated for torture “much
stronger than waterboarding.” In September, he suggested that
whistleblowers should be executed. He has pardoned war criminals and other
human rights abusers (e.g., Michael
Behenna, Joe
Arpaio). Trump also admires and glorifies violent authoritarians, like
Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Ergodan, Kim Jong-un and, of course, Vladimir Putin. All
this in addition to the violence his policies are wreaking.
There is not a direct line
between Trump referring to
immigrants as vermin who will “infest our country” and the massacre of
immigrants at an El Paso Walmart. Neither the antisemitic
conspiracy theory that George Soros was funding migrant “caravans”
from Central America, nor Trump’s lie about Middle Easterners infiltrating the
caravans, is solely responsible for the murderous attack on a Jewish synagogue
in Pittsburgh. Yet if these bigoted tropes did not cause massacres,
surely they are part of the environment that has fueled them.
Speaking of antisemitism,
Trump’s “fake news” has always been one shade shy of Hitler’s “Lügenpresse”
(“lying press”). White supremacists have long referred to the paper of record
as the “Jew York Times.” Given Trump’s constant
description of the media as “the enemy of the people,” the possibility
is ever-present, in this age of mass shootings, that someone will walk into a
newsroom and open fire. If I’m honest, it surprises me that this has
happened only
once since Trump took office.
None of this found its way
into the Times’ coverage of the video. Instead, there are denials by lots
of people, saying they neither saw nor knew about the video; and then this at
the end:
Throughout his 2016 campaign
and presidency, Mr. Trump has sought to demonize the news media, partly out of
frustration about the coverage of his administration and partly because he
likes to have an opponent to target.
This is Nazi-normalizing barf
journalism. Poor Trump; he’s just frustrated by the bad press. Responding by
labeling journalists liars and enemies of the people is just what most of us
would do in the same situation. Plus, he likes having a foil. A reasonable
strategy.
I want to know how Michael
Schmidt and Maggie Haberman (the bylined reporters) know that these are Trump’s
reasons for demonizing the fourth estate. It’s a pretty definitive sentence,
assigning motivation without any source or documentation. (Unlike the following
sentence, which has at least anonymous sources: “Mr. Trump has also sought to
undermine confidence in the mainstream media, some of his advisers acknowledge
privately, to make people doubt the accuracy of less favorable accounts of what
goes on in his administration.”)
But more importantly, no, it
is not OK for the president of the United States to baldly claim that
documented reporting is “fake news”; that media are the enemy; and that
journalists are bad people. It is, in fact, extremely dangerous. It undermines
one of the most important checks on government power, and, as the video itself
attests, it invites violence against journalists. The New York Times should
say so.
You can send a message to
the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful
communication is the most effective.
Trump targets Corbyn in UK election intervention
By Laura Tiernan
2 November 2019
2 November 2019
US President Donald Trump
intervened at the start of Britain’s snap general election campaign Thursday to
publicly attack Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, warning that a Corbyn
premiership would take the UK into “bad places.”
Trump’s statements were issued
during an extended live interview with Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage on LBC
radio, where Farage has hosted since January 2017.
“Corbyn would be so bad for
your country, he’d be so bad, he’d take you on such a bad way, he’d take you into
such bad places,” he told Farage.
Most media coverage of Trump’s
phone call has focused on his pro-Brexit message in calling for an alliance
between Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Farage. “I would
really like to see you and Boris get together [be]cause you would really have
some numbers,” he said, before warning the Tory leader to be “very careful” not
to back away from a break with the European Union. Johnson’s withdrawal
agreement meant that “we can’t make a trade deal,” he declared—blowing a hole
in the government’s post-Brexit strategy.
In contrast, Trump’s ominous
attack on Corbyn was swiftly passed over. But his intervention comes less than
four months after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned the US government
would not allow a Corbyn government to take office and would “push back” to
prevent this.
Pompeo’s threats, made at a
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on June 3, were
“leaked” by the Washington Post and coincided with a three-day state
visit by Trump to the UK. Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to
run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait
for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best …
It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
The motive behind Trump’s
latest intervention was made clear within hours. For more than three years,
contending factions of the ruling class have sought to dragoon the working
class behind either a pro-EU or Brexit agenda. But two events on Thursday
showed that class issues are coming to the fore.
The first was Johnson’s visit
to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. Leaving the hospital after a staged
photo opportunity, Johnson was booed and jeered by dozens of patients and
National Health Service staff.
The same morning, a BBC radio
interview with Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle backfired in spectacular fashion,
after host Emma Barnett attacked Labour’s mild proposals to increase the tax
rate for billionaires. Barnett response to Moyles’ statement that “I don’t
think anyone in this country should be a billionaire” was nakedly hostile. “Why
on earth shouldn’t people be able to be billionaires,” she asked, “Some people
aspire to be a billionaire in this country. Is that a dirty thing?”
By mid-afternoon #Billionaires
was the top-trending item on social media. Video footage of Barnett’s incensed
defence of the financial oligarchy became the subject of popular derision:
“An average NHS worker would
need to work 100m hrs to earn £1bn. Working daily, 24 hrs a day, for 11,400
YEARS. i.e. since the end of the last Ice Age and the dawn of urban
civilisation and the domestication of cattle,” one Twitter user responded,
concluding, “Billionaires haven’t ‘earned’ their wealth. They stole it.”
“It wasn’t 39 billionaires who
were found dead in the back of refrigerated container in Essex,” wrote another.
Corbyn’s election campaign
seeks to politically channel the mass opposition of workers and young people to
endless austerity and social inequality behind the pro-capitalist programme of
the Labour Party. His election videos promise a “once in a generation
opportunity” to “put wealth and power in the hands of the many not the few.” By
Thursday, a surge in voter registrations—316,264 in just 48 hours—pointed to
the hunger for political change among young people. Nearly one third of
registrations were from those aged 18-24.
Joker II
Dominique Rudaz
Can we say that in the movie “Joker”, the protagonist Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, tries to constitute himself as a subject? Are we witnessing a subjective construction?
Firstly, we could ask ourselves if it was Fleck who constructed his "artistic name"? Was it not the talk-show host, Murray Franklin, played by Robert de Niro, who named him “Joker” after showing the recording of his stand-up comedy show? It is only before the show goes live, near the end of the movie, that Arthur requests that Murray introduces him as the “Joker”, a reference to Murray's previous mockery.
Secondly, can we consider Fleck's laughter as an “ironic” one? I believe that there is nothing ironic here; rather I would suggest that it is a laughter absolutely outside-of-meaning [hors-sens], without any purpose to attack the link with the Other, which is the essence of irony. Also, such as he received from the Other his artistic name, he also received from the Other (probably the psychiatrist) the nomination for his laughter outside-of-meaning: the little piece of paper that he shows to the mother’s child on the bus at the beginning of the movie, where it is written that he suffers from a head trauma that causes him to laugh at inappropriate times.
Thirdly, when Fleck kills Murray during the talk show, can we call this an “acting out”? I think it would be perhaps more appropriate to consider it as a “passage to the act”, albeit in a paradoxical way because it is carried out on the stage, during the “show”. However, Fleck seems to be out of any dialectical bond to the Other at that moment. Interestingly, after his “passage to the act”, he gets off the stage and goes in front of the camera, thereby breaking the “fourth wall” and exiting the world’s stage [la scène du monde].
Furthermore, considering his first murder (the three drunken businessmen), one could suggest that he did it mainly because he had at that moment a gun with him, a gun that he did not seek, but was given to him, in an imposing manner, by his co-worker.
With that in mind, I think that rather than speaking of “knowing-how”, “structuring function” and "suppletion", one could state that the “Joker” is 'a body inhabited by the Other', which is another way of saying that there has been no subjective construction.
Capitalism, Democracy and Europe – Varoufakis Interviewed for the Great Transition Initiative
Interview with Yanis
Varoufakis
As harsh austerity and
xenophobic nationalism fester in Europe, Yanis Varoufakis discusses his
antidote with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White.
Interviewer: What inspired
your career trajectory from academic economist to prominent supranational
activist?
Varoufakis: I went into politics
because of the financial crisis of 2008. Had financial capitalism not imploded,
I would have happily continued my quite obscure academic work at some
university. The chain reaction of economic crises, financial bailouts, and the
rise of what I call the Nationalist International that almost broke financial
capitalism, and brought Greece severe hardship, had a profound impact on me.
In the early to mid-2000s, I
was beginning to feel that a crash was approaching. I could see that global
financial imbalances were growing exponentially and that our generation or the
next would be hampered by a systemic crisis.
I left my cocoon writing about
mathematical economics and moved from Sydney to Athens at the time Greece was
becoming insolvent. I began writing about the current situation and appearing
on TV, warning against covering up insolvency with bailouts. Through these
appearances as well as writing about government’s role in averting the
impending crisis, I drifted into politics.
The second transition, from government
to activism, was much simpler. Restructuring Greece’s debt was my top priority
as Minister of Finance. The moment the Prime Minister surrendered to the
austerity demands of the European Commission and accepted another loan without
debt restructuring, resignation became the easiest decision of my life. Once I
resigned, I was back in the streets, theaters, and town hall meetings setting
up the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). I saw activism as the best
way to confront the political and banking establishment. Four years later, in
July 2019, our Greek branch, entitled MeRA25, entered Parliament with nine MPs.
The fight continues.
Interviewer: You are one of
the sharpest critics of neoliberalism today. How would you define
“neoliberalism”?
Varoufakis: To begin, let me
challenge the term “neoliberal.” The use of the term in relation to West-Soviet
relations was just a cloak under which to hide libertarian industrial
feudalism, but neoliberalism has as much to do with financialized capital
post-1970s as it does with Cold War geopolitical relations. Similarly—and I
know this is a controversial statement—there’s nothing neoliberal about the
world we live in today. It is neither new in the sense of “neo” nor liberal in
the sense of fostering democratic values. Look at what has been happening in
Europe over the last decade. Gigantic bank bailouts are funded through
taxation. There is nothing really “neoliberal” about the use of such vast
subsidies from the public to finance capitalists.
Even under the government of
Margaret Thatcher in the UK from 1979 to 1990, the height of so-called
neoliberalism in the UK, the British state grew rapidly, becoming bigger, more
powerful, and more authoritarian than ever. We witnessed a state that was
weaponized on behalf of the City of London to the benefit of a very small
segment of the population. I don’t think we should concede the term
“neoliberalism” to the brutish establishment using state power to redistribute
wealth from the haves to the have-nots.
Interviewer: How has this
“brutish establishment” become so dominant in shaping the global order?
Varoufakis: The first two
decades after World War II were the Golden Era of capitalism for a very simple
reason: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was projected onto the rest of the West
under the Bretton Woods system. It was a remarkable, though imperfect, system,
a kind of enlightenment without socialism. Structures to restrain financial
capital were put into place. Banks could not do as they pleased; that’s why
bankers hated the Bretton Woods system. Recall that Roosevelt banned bankers
from attending the Bretton Woods conference and subjected them to reserve
controls and rules against shifting money across international borders.
The result of the Bretton
Woods system was a remarkable reduction in inequality concurrent with steady
growth, low unemployment, and next to zero inflation. The system was predicated
upon the US’s status as a surplus country, recycling wealth through Europe and
Japan in a variety of ways. By the end of the 1960s, however, the Bretton Woods
system proved unsustainable. The US began to incur trade deficits with Europe,
Japan, and later China at the same time Wall Street, unrestrained by regulatory
boundaries, attracted most of the profits from the rest of the world.
Unshackled financial
institutions began creating what amounted to private money. Holding an inflow
of $5 billion daily for a mere five minutes was enough to divvy it up into
derivatives, opaque investment instruments that contributed to the 2008
financial crisis. This and other forms of financial engineering produced huge
volumes of private money, the value of which, as in the 1929 crash, eventually
collapsed in domino-like fashion. Authorities in Washington, Brussels, Paris,
and Athens immediately transferred the resulting losses onto the shoulders of
taxpayers, a form of socialism for bankers. I described this colossal
mishandling of our financial system in my 2009 book The Global Minotaur,
six years before I became the Greek Minister of Finance.
When I became Minister, I
believed that a global crisis of capitalism was underway. Imagine, then, my
walking into a meeting of the Eurogroup with all the European finance ministers
in the room who knew I held this view. I was the red flag in the eyes of the
establishment. In the same vein, the German ambassador to Greece and one of the
most powerful (and most corrupt) Greek bankers had warned the future,
democratically elected Prime Minster that my appointment as Finance Minister
would cause them to close ATMs across the country and lead to collapse of the
Greek banking system.
Interviewer: Given your
experience inside and outside government, do you believe that there is a
fundamental tension between capitalism and democracy?
Varoufakis: Yes. Compare the
character of a democratic election with a general meeting of shareholders of a
private corporation. Both are elections, but in the democratic process, the one
person-one vote rule applies, whereas in the corporate process, you have one
share-one vote, essentially a wealth-based voting structure. My fellow
economists, especially the true believers in free markets, love to portray the
market as a voting mechanism. It is true that every time you buy a tub of
yogurt, you are voting in favor of that brand. The same applies when you buy a
Ford as opposed to a Volkswagen. The more money one has, the more votes one
casts.
So, if you think of capitalism
as a voting mechanism, it is anti-democratic in the sense that money determines
power. The evolution of capitalism over the last few centuries is a history of
the constant transfer of power to the wealthy, including the power to make
decisions that affect the distribution of income.
Over time, power has been
redistributed from the political sphere to the economic sphere. Until the early
eighteenth century, there was no difference between these spheres. If you were
the king or the baron, you also were rich. And if you were rich, you belonged
to the nobility. With the rise of capitalism, a lowly merchant could become
economically powerful. As the separation of the political and the economic
evolved, power gradually transferred to the latter. What we now call democracy
is not real democracy given the growing influence of economic power. To be
sure, the voting franchise has been extended to all males (from only
landowners), to women, and to blacks. A parallel democratization process has
not occurred in the economic sphere, where power has become less inclusive and
increasingly concentrated.
From the 1870s to the 1920s,
democracy gradually became disempowered as the corporate world—a democracy-free
zone—emerged. Since the end of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, power has
migrated to finance. Goldman Sachs suddenly became more important than Ford,
General Motors, or General Electric. Even corporations like Apple and Google
are increasingly becoming financialized. Apple, for example, is sitting on
hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is operating more like a financier than
an iPhone producer.
This dynamic guarantees that
when we vote, an act of celebrating democracy, we increasingly are
participating in a sphere that has become totally disempowered. Capitalism is
predicated on defeating democracy, even as the democratic cloak continues to
legitimize the prevailing system.
Interviewer: Given this
fundamental tension between capitalism and democracy, do you believe the
European Union can be reformed? And if so, how?
Varoufakis: We must aim for
something much closer to a democratic federated Europe than what we have now.
The tragedy is that the moment you start making such a case as the only
antidote to disintegration, you serve the cause of nationalists, xenophobes,
racists, and fascists. In ten years, either we’re going to have a democratic
federated European Union, or the political monsters will be victorious.
How do we achieve a future
democratic federation? The most urgent and difficult task is to go out into the
streets of Athens, Rome, Berlin, Paris, and Lisbon and have a discussion with
people about the crisis the EU faces. Many don’t want to hear about Europe’s
future anymore. What used to be a very attractive vision of a unified Europe as
a larger homeland for all its citizens has become toxic in the minds and the
hearts of many Europeans. For them, the democratic European Union has become
synonymous with an anti-humanist, even totalitarian, vision. We need to
construct a new vision to counteract this kind of thinking.
Interviewer: You have been at
the forefront of the recently formed Democracy in Europe Movement 2025
(DiEM25). Tell us about DiEM25’s pan-European mission and strategy.
Varoufakis: DiEM25 seeks to
put forward proposals that stimulate cooperation that is truly democratic. This
will take time and will require recreating European institutions and a
political economy that includes a massive Green New Deal or similar strategy.
We must spend immediately at least 500 billion Euros annually on green energy,
green transport, and a green transition in industry and agriculture. We can do
this by creatively harnessing the power of existing institutions. The European
Investment Bank, for example, could issue bonds worth half a trillion Euros
every year, with that money going toward good-quality green jobs and
technologies. The European Central Bank, sitting on the sidelines, could be
ready to buy these bonds if needed to keep inflation in check. At the same
time, we must engage with a broad spectrum of groups to stabilize Europe and so
to bring back hope. With that movement underway, we can then have a discussion
about democratic governance of the EU.
I’m an old-fashioned lefty. I
don’t believe in destroying institutions. I believe in taking them over and
transforming them into true public servants.
Interviewer: What does DiEM25
offer beyond the proposals of parties like Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in
Spain, or other Green or Left parties throughout Europe?
Varoufakis: Most members of
these groups are our friends and comrades. We share a humanist attitude towards
life and capitalism. The reason we created DiEM25 is that the major crises in
Europe require local and national action as well as pan-European, if not
global, action. It makes no sense to prioritize the local and national over the
transnational, or vice versa. We must operate simultaneously at all levels.
For example, the design of
urban transportation systems must consider the planetary, or systemic, impacts
of alternative choices. The problem with national political parties is that they
are not very good at such systemic thinking. What we need in Europe is a
pan-European movement, which is more than a confederacy of autonomously
operating states that make promises to local and national electorates
independently of one another and then get together in Brussels to discuss the
promises that each has committed to. This model is doomed to fail.
When DiEM25 was inaugurated in
February of 2016, we sought to bring together Podemos, Die Linke, and allies
from the UK to develop a Green New Deal for Europe. We hoped to unify such
movements around a common pan-European program. It didn’t work out that way.
Why? Die Linke comprises two distinct groups: one faction believes that the
European Union is beyond redemption and should be dismantled; the other
believes that the EU is salvageable through democratic activism and social
transformation, a view shared by DiEM. This division between supporters of
“exit” and “remain” stood in the way of an alliance.
Another impediment to unity
was that Podemos and others opposed a European voice in national and local
policies and decision-making. What is Podemos going to say, for example, about
the level and allocation of investment funds among member states? If a Podemos
candidate is elected to the European Parliament, what financial policies will
she support? We need clarity and unity on such issues—to have a voice not of a
Greek, a German, or a Spaniard, but of a European internationalist. We will
continue to struggle to create a unified, coherent agenda for all of Europe.
Unity without cohesion is the curse of the left.
Let’s not forget that the
historical call was not for workers of each nation to organize within their
borders. It was for workers of the world to unite.
Interviewer: Are there lessons
to be learned from previous episodes of leftist internationalism, such as the
Internationals, for our current time of global mobilization?
Varoufakis: There are many
lessons. Anybody who doesn’t learn from history is a dangerous fanatic. Lesson
number one is that socialist nationalism is the worst antidote to national
socialism. Remember what happened in World War I when the German Social
Democrats were co-opted into a nationalist agenda and supported the war effort
of Germany against the much of Europe. That kind of socialist nationalism will always
be gobbled up by Nazism. Anyone who supports a left-wing agenda and at the same
time supports a nationalist, populist workers agenda is going to be devoured by
fascists. They will end up effectively blowing wind into the fascists’ sails,
intentionally or not.
Lesson number two is that
Internationals fail if they are just a confederacy of national parties. The
moment agendas and organizations are nationally based, as was the case in
postwar Communist parties, the international movement will inevitably fragment
and collapse. This is why DiEM25 places all its energies into not becoming a
confederacy of a Greek DiEM25, a German DiEM25, and an Italian DiEM25. This is
not a theoretical matter, but a practical one: transnationality as opposed to
confederacy is critical to building a new, progressive political enterprise.
Studying the failures of earlier Internationals is fundamental in shaping this
strategy.
To be clear, when we created
DiEM25, we envisioned a movement, not a party. And it remains a movement, but
we decided about a year ago to create our own “electoral wings” in each
country. In Germany, DiEM25 created Democratie Europa (“Democracy in Europe”);
in Denmark, Alternativet (“The Alternative”). In short, if you are a member of
a DiEM25–created party, you also are a member of the larger movement. But you
also can be a member of the larger movement without membership in a
DiEM25-created party.
Interviewer: In a forthcoming
book, you imagine “another world” in 2035 in which global financial capital is
essentially demolished. What would this world look like? What would it take to
get there?
Varoufakis: I begin with the
view that the present system is, simply stated, both awful and unsustainable.
My story is told from the perspective of 2035, when my characters discover
that, back in 2008, at the height of our crisis, the timeline split into two:
one that you and I inhabit and another one that yielded a post-capitalist
society. It is my narrative strategy for sketching out how post-capitalism
could work and feel today had our response to the 2008 been different.
My forthcoming book,
entitled Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, asks
the following questions: Could the world be non-capitalist or post-capitalist?
Could we see humanism in action? What would it look like? What would socialist
corporations look like? How would they function? How would democracy function?
What would happen to borders, migration, and defense? I try to create a vision
of a liberal, socialist society that is not based on private property but does
use money as a vehicle for exchange and markets as coordinating devices. I
preserve money and markets because the alternative would be to fall to some
fearsome hierarchical control, which, for me, is a nightmare scenario.
Interviewer: A deep
transformation of values and institutions is essential to building a world of
solidarity, well-being, and ecological resilience—what we call a Great
Transition—is more urgent than ever. In a dark time, what basis for hope and
advice can you offer fellow internationalists at this critical, historic
moment?
Varoufakis: We have the tools
necessary in order to spend at least five percent of the global GDP on a Great
Transition that saves the planet. Technically, we know how to create a new
Bretton Woods, a progressive Green New Deal that diverts resources to saving
the planet and creating quality green jobs across the globe.
To achieve such a future, we
must offer a cautionary note regarding the role of borders. Some on the left
are unfortunately moving toward the belief that migrants are a threat to
domestic workers. That is a right-wing narrative that is factually untrue. We
need to emancipate progressives from the notion that strong borders protect the
working class. They do not. They are a scar on the face of the Earth, and they
harm labor across the world.
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