 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Merron Kalili, we are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe, and this is our regular live coordinating call. Russia's war in Ukraine is showing no signs of stopping and while it's still ongoing brutal tragedy for the Ukrainian people, its damaging effects are being felt all over the world in the form of higher energy prices, higher food prices, and industrial metal prices, in the form of our government's defense spending plans in our politics and it's impacting our discourse too, turning us against Russian people and increasingly against each other. Are we condemned to watching all this play out on our screens? Is our only option to attend protests? Or is there anything else that we as regular citizens can do to push back against the war, to help to bring about peace, to lessen the humanitarian catastrophe and to tackle the forthcoming wave of economic instability that's coming for us here in Europe? These are the questions I'll be putting to our panel. We've got our own Yanis Varoufakis and the rest of the crew from DM25, you out there, if you have anything you want to chime in on, any thoughts, ideas, rants, questions, concerns, please put them in the chat, it's YouTube, it's live, and we'll put them to our panel. Let me hand it over now to Yanis to kick us off, Yanis. Thank you, my friend. There is a war which is devastating lives in the Ukraine and there is, of course, the class war which goes well beyond the borders of Ukraine. Because when we say that energy prices and food prices in Europe, in Asia, in Africa are rising and destroying people's life prospects, let us not forget that there are a bunch of oligarchs and I don't mean Russian oligarchs, I mean Western oligarchs, American and European oligarchs who are laughing all the way to the bank. If you're selling fracked natural gas from Missouri or from New Mexico or Texas, you are having a party because a whole huge European gas market is opened up with the end of the contracts between Germany and Italy on the one hand and Russia on the other. If you're selling weapons, if you're in the military industrial complex, you are having a super party, a hyper party. All of us just announced you'll spend 100 billion euros and, of course, he's not gonna spend it on European weapons because we don't have that much. He'll spend on American weapons. So, you know, arms suppliers, fossil fuel, the hated fossil fuel industry, all the bad people in the world are celebrating the war and they really, they have one nightmare. Their nightmare is peace. If peace breaks out in the Ukraine, all their plans will lay in ruins. Now, DiEM25 is a nuanced and sophisticated movement. We are perfectly capable of looking at Putin and recognizing a beast, a criminal, a rogue, a KGB strategist who doesn't really care at all about his own people, let alone about the people of Ukraine or the people of Europe or Africa or Syria. He has devastated Grosny. He has devastated Aleppo in Syria. He's now devastating Ukrainian cities. We are perfectly capable of condemning him for the criminal that he is while at the very same time, condemning Joe Biden and the leadership of NATO for wishing to perpetuate the war, for not suing for peace because their folks are there in their circle, making lots of money. This is where we are. We are at the crossroads of a war which is lucrative to the class warriors in the West and to the criminals like Putin in the East. So we need to fight for peace. We need to fight against Putin, but we need to fight also against our leaders who are shamefully, shamefully pretending to support the Ukrainian people when they are not lifting their little finger in order to do the only decent thing which is to broker a deal between Biden and Putin to end the carnage and to end the inflation of prices of food, of energy and so on and so forth. So what do we do? Well, we have to follow our sophisticated analysis to do sophisticated action. So let me give you an example because we need to be practical. Tomorrow President Zelensky of Ukraine is going to deliver a speech through video link in our parliament here in Greece. From day one, here at Meta 25 said that we don't care who Zelensky is. We don't care whether we like him or not, whether we would vote for him or not. We are highly critical of him, but it really is irrelevant. The people of Ukraine are suffering a brutal invasion by Putin's armies. So we support them, we stand by them and therefore we are going to honor their leader, whoever that leader might be. Personally, for instance, I think that Abu Abbas is a corrupt person, the person leading the Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority, so what? When Palestinian homes are being demolished by the Israeli army, we stand by the Palestinians and we honor their leadership. If we don't, even though I have this particular opinion for Abu Abbas, similarly with Zelensky. So we would have been in parliament tomorrow to welcome Mr. Zelensky, even by video link, except that our parliament, our government banned any debate. So what they're going to do, which is quite astonishing. They're going to beam him in, he's going to give delivery speech and then we'll be switched off and then we'll have to go. No debate, no opportunity to convey to him the views of the Greek parliament, not even to have a debate amongst ourselves after he goes. So we're going to do the nuanced thing tomorrow. We're going to be represented by one and B only out of our seven as a sign of respect to the people of Ukraine. The rest of us are going to be outside in a demonstration against the war. Now that's not hedging bets, that is being sensible. Saying we respect the people and honor the people who are fighting against Russia's Putin's armies. We symbolically honor their leader, Zelensky, by having a representative in the parliament. But at the same time, we are not buying the Western propaganda tsunami, which is trying to turn the people of the West against the people of the East, the people of Greece and Germany and France against the people of Russia. If anybody can try and condemn Putin, it's not NATO, it's not Boris Johnson, it's not Olaf Scholz, it's not Mr. Tages, it is the people of Russia. And this madness, which is disguising a support and solidarity with Ukraine is delivering the people of Russia into the prisons of Putin and delivering the people of Ukraine to a permanent quagmire and a permanent conflict that kills them in the Ukraine. When it comes to prices, it is important not to buy the oligarchic lie that prices are rising in proportion to the increase in costs that nobody can do anything about because it's an act of God or war, rubbish. As we speak, the percentage of the prices of the price increases, which is due to the increase in fossil fuels and the price of gas is less than 50%. Less than 50%. So for every euro of extra that we pay for our electricity, only half, less than half of it is justified by the increase in costs. The rest is oligarchic power, monopoly power, oligopoly power. Think about it, the European Union has a awful, God forsaken toxic scheme for pricing electricity. Do you know that we are paying for every kilowatt? We're paying as if its cost was the highest cost incurred by burning gas, even if that kilowatt has been produced by a solar panel or by a hydroelectric pump. In other words, zero marginal cost. You're paying for it as if it was produced by the most expensive LNG imported from Texas. People are making money out of this. If you're running a privatized electricity power station that uses not the most expensive form of gas, but any other source of electricity, then you are making a mint. And the greater the increase in prices, the more toxic this war becomes, the greater the profits of the oligarchy. Now we need to get out there and demonstrate about this and demand the re-nationalization of our electricity grid of our power stations. Because let's face, think about it. There was a piece in the EU intelligence today that I shared with you and it makes perfect sense. When we had to procure vaccines altogether, it made perfect sense, didn't it? The European Union bought vaccines en masse and had the opportunity, I mean Ursula von der Leyen made a mess of it because she's incompetent, but at least she had an opportunity because she bought on behalf of all Europeans of vaccines to reduce the price, to use the size of the purchase in order to reduce the cost of vaccines for everyone, for Greeks, for Germans, for French and so on and so forth, right? Now, why can't they do the same thing with gas? Why can't we buy gas in the short term at least en masse as the European Union to beat prices down? Well, the reason is that they've created this phony market, phony marketplace around Europe. They've privatized power stations. So they're supposedly competing with one another. So they do not want to have low costs. They do not want to cooperate in securing the lowest price for energy sources in Europe. We have created a monster in the privatized electricity system. So as activists, we have to go out there, campaign for peace, for the immediate cessation of conflict or fire, for a neutral Ukraine against the interests of NATO and against the interests of Putin. And at the same time, we have to expose the lies that our leaders tell us about the reason that prices are where they are. The reason prices are where they are is only very partly related to the increase in costs. It is mostly, more than 50% of the inflation that we're facing is due to the fact that oligarchs are having a field day alongside arms dealers and LNG taxon providers. Thanks, Yanis. So it sounds like a kind of a need for investigative journalism in this area in order to gather some proof points and things to push for a campaign. Dushan. So I have been doing various stuff ranging from leafletting, street actions, article writing, both scientific and newspapers, podcasts, giving lectures and workshops, but none of that is going to make an instant damage to corporations, polluters, abusers, arms dealers, bankers and so on and so on. So I will try to make some points today of my favorite actions and tactics that you can take. But let me first say that there is no manual for this. You need to do some homework at least, but there are some broad guidelines. So if you want to change something, let's say you start with a petition, which is very standard thing to do. You have the petition, you have some votes and then what you do? You start sending emails, you invite others to send emails. If that doesn't work, you start calling those polluters. I will stick to polluting because I'm mostly environmental, is then the rest follows in my identity. You start calling them on their phones. That doesn't work. You show up in front of their houses with whistle, whistles, banners, mega phones. That doesn't work as well. Okay, start emailing their suppliers and buyers. Start calling them on the phone. Start showing up in front of their houses. That doesn't work. Expand it to their friends, family. Everyone needs to know what they are doing. I need to be explicit before. This is PS. This is for the serious offenses in terms of someone is heavily abusing human rights, animal rights, environmental rights and so on and so on. So if you have a polluted lake, make a picture of that polluted lake. Go with that picture in front of the house or the store of the supplier of that company, of the buyer of that company. Expand it to them personally, expand it to the family. There are various tactics that you can use in order to make them stop. And these are only some of ways. We don't have time to expand more probably, but if you are looking to do something right now, go to don'tpaintedgreen.eu, someone will link it in the chat as we speak and follow those steps. These are the steps, the very beginning of our campaign in order to stop European commissioning from painting gas and nuclear energy as green. This is green ecocide and we won't let that happen. Please join us in that battle. And if you identify with some of the points, you will see that one of the steps is joining BM. So go there, fulfill all of the steps, including join BM and message me to don't let them paint it green and to stop others from polluting, selling arms and doing work. Thank you. Thank you Dushan and indeed our campaign to save the NHS. Your NHS needs you.com. It's a good example, I think of a digital activism campaign that automates a lot of those things that you said, writing to MPs, lobbying, et cetera, but from a digital point of view and it can still have an impact. So thank you very much for those ideas Dushan and let's return again to that a little bit later in terms of tactics and what people can do. Johannes, Johannes Baer. Thank you. And thank you Dushan for giving already a lot of concrete examples of what people can do. I wanna speak a little bit around one thing that I think came to my mind when thinking about the topic of conversation of tonight, which is that a lot of the problems that Johannes also has been describing are coming from a system where power is very centralized in governments, in military armies, but also for example in the energy system. And I think for us to work against that, a keyword is for us to concentrate always to no matter at what topic we are looking to is on decentralization. So for example, speaking about energy prices that are now rising, of course a lot of people who are most vulnerable to this don't have much possibilities to set up their own PV stations because maybe they don't own the house where they're living in or they don't have the necessary money to make them. If you have, of course, that is one possibility. In general, I think it is for all of us to organize in our neighborhoods because that is where we are closest to the people, have good connections to our neighbors and the community around us, get in contact and then maybe we can chip in and build some infrastructure. For example, for energy use, for heating, for electricity, we can do a project where we all bring our little resources in and make something happen on the local scale. And I think that also goes for a lot of the other topics. For example, the refugee crisis that unfortunately we're facing now with people having to flee the war in Ukraine as they have, we constantly over the last years had people coming from different areas or countries of crisis around the world. Also there, I've been helping out, for example, the other weekend at night at the central bus station in Berlin, welcoming refugees and trying to help them find a place to stay, give them some food that people have been donating. All of this was run basically by people just showing up, people that have a little bit of time to spare that went to the central bus station and with the support of some organizations also and a lot of donations from people, yeah, we're helping out. So all of these are examples, I think, where community work can help for us to connect to the people around us and then make a change on a very practical, very local level. And through that, I think we can also then take the next step and do some of the things that Dushan has been describing in confronting the powerful, because together, of course, it's very difficult to do something alone on the street. But if you're a small group that can support each other and stop something that is happening in the area that is bad for the community, I think if you can work together, it's already much easier for you to achieve something and to be able to do something. Thanks. Thanks, Johannes. And you put your finger on something very important there is the humanitarian actions. And our own Judith Meyer has been developing, if I recall correctly, a platform for accommodating refugees. Judith. Yeah, I've coded a platform. It's safehost.space where all these volunteer groups around Germany and beyond even Slovakia and so on can have host families register and can then verify that these host families are actually who they say they are to make it a bit more secure because a lot of people are trying to exploit the situation of Ukrainian refugees or refugees in general. So safehost.space is trying to make it more secure but also to enable this grassroots work of volunteers on the ground doing things that the state is not ready or unable to do. So for me, when I see a problem, I try to code something for it. And I think that's a pretty special ability. It's not something that I can say anyone can just pick up and do obviously if you can code solutions, we really, really need you in the IT team. Also to create alternatives for the kind of actions that have already been mentioned. For example, Dushan was talking about creating a petition. Now, the first person thinking about creating a new petition would probably go to change.org. But change.org is funded to a large part by Peter Thiel, who is currently trying to privatize the NHS. We need alternatives. We need non-profit funded alternatives and DM25 is trying to provide these. If you have a petition on DM25, we have the infrastructure to support that, for example, or also to do crowdfunding campaigns and other things that progressives generally need. So you can contribute to the code if you're a coder. If you're not a coder, the most useful thing that you can do online is probably an information campaign. Because if you go out on the street with a home-painted sign, you might be seen by 10 people, maybe 100 people, you might influence very few. But if you do a really good presentation of a topic either in written or picture format, video format, even as a meme, if you do it really well on the internet, you can influence tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. And that is where I think we really need more manpower to influence the world and to make alternative views more heard and to alert people to facts like what Janne said, that most of the cost of energy prices is not going to raw materials, but it's just monopoly power extracting an extra profit. Thanks, Judith. And if we can perhaps stay on that for a moment and let me ask you, Judith, something that some friends of mine do is open source intelligence in terms of curating and authenticating images that are coming out of Ukraine. And they have skills in that area and they're putting them to use in that way. Are there any other things that you've seen in any other examples of online campaigning that you think could make a difference in the short term for people that have those kinds of skills? No, it's kind of difficult because everyone is trying to do something, you know? One thing that I really enjoyed is those people who are helping to track the possessions of the super rich. So if you can, for example, identify who owns this yacht that is docked somewhere in, let's say Greece or let's say France or wherever, then there's a chance that this yacht might be confiscated if it's a Russian oligarch. And also in general, I like these trackers. Some people built these trackers on Twitter where you can actually see these yachts or these military aircraft are going this way or that way. So the things that haven't been accountable until now suddenly become accountable because anyone can see what is happening there. That's right. I think you're referring to the Russian oligarch jet tracker which, if I recall correctly, is developed by a student in the US and tracks the locations of the yachts and the jets of Russian oligarchs. So yeah, nice. Ivana Narodovich from Serbia. Yeah, hi, hello. The situation seems very scary, I would say almost, because the economic crisis that would hit us after the pandemic is now replaced or built on or take it as you wish, but the prices are going high and they went higher in one month and people are already getting receipts that they cannot pay for heating and so on that are multiple times higher than last month. And for example, I know that on one island in Croatia the prices of water went up 33% which only tells you that governments are now using this opportunity which is unrelated to gas or oil or anything just to rob their citizens even more. That is one part of the crisis that we might know but it won't help us again, just not just petitioning but petitioning and all of these high tech stuff that Judith was talking about which is of course important and necessary to use in these times but I'm not sure that the working class or even middle class is, is knowledgeable so much about these things or would think that they would help us just get by on a daily basis. So it would be a question now probably to organize more on the community service side and try to help people that will be in need more and more unfortunately. Thanks, Ivana, Maya Pellevich from Serbia as well. Yes, so we've been talking a lot about of course all the very bad things that are happening with the war, with the economic crisis and one thing that I wanted to point out which I do not think that people think about a lot at this time because of course there are much more important things to talk about is actually what is happening at this moment with the culture and the cultural scenes around Europe and the things change in the cultural field whenever there is a war. And now of course we have a real war and we also have a cold war that is happening with the Russophobia that is happening everywhere. We do not talk a lot about it but we as people in Serbia that see a lot of Russians coming from Russia here that are running away from Putin's regime have to say that the situation for Russians is very hard at the moment. I talked to a friend, she is moving to Serbia actually now because she can only move to this country of all the countries in the world at the moment. She is completely moving. She is a professor of political science at the University of Moscow. She signed a couple of petitions. As Dushan said, sign petitions, well you do not sign petitions actually in Russia because then you have to leave the country completely and she is going to start all over here actually as an instructor of Tai Chi which is crazy because she cannot do anything else here as she is Russian and there is a lot of people that will have problems in the future. We have to also talk about these people of course talking about the Ukrainians but also to think about these Russians because as I know in Europe they are not welcome at all and they have big problems going to Europe. The Russian artists have big problems producing their work. We also have problems at the moment showing our work because we are from Serbia we are also not being welcomed which we are used to and so we will have also one other thing that I think is happening now and it will be happening in the future in Europe mostly and it's called art profiteers. You have war profiteers and you have also art profiteers people that have profits from doing art that is at the moment the good art you should do and of course that art is only the art that is not Russian and that is in a way saying what Europe thinks it should be said so I also have one example of that I had friends from Serbia and Bosnia that were supposed to do a show in Dortmund in Germany and they were cancelled because the show they were supposed to do was also in a very weird way cancelled they told them that now they have to do instead of that show they were supposed to do they're supposed to do a new play that has been made like in an instant in a week and as a playwright I know that the play cannot be made in a week that would be a play of tweets of Ukrainian people she read the play she was like this is not a play this is not quality art this is made only because you think this should be shown and they just told her we don't care if you don't want to do this just go and she went and of course another person took this thing to do it we will have a lot of projects that will be in this way commissioned and that is not real art because as we know real art is critical real art has to be honest and you should not have any kind of you should not be an art profiteer as you should not be a war profiteer so I think that all the people that are in the cultural sector mostly in Europe if they have a situation where contemporary Russian artists are banned where contemporary playwrights are banned or any other countries that do not in a way support Ukraine I think that they should react to this as artists should think about people because not all people from Russia are criminals and they are not all for Putin and I think that we should also think about these people that will have big problems in the near future thank you Maya again a very important thing that you mentioned about stereotypes and the image of Russian people going forward so I think someone mentioned earlier in this discussion that information campaigns there's a need for information campaigns and I think there definitely will be some a need for this so that everyday Russian people don't get caught up in this horrible propagandistic mess which is the discourse around the war Dushan, let's bring Dushan back in since we are at this topic just to mention one small jest from one city in Montenegro called Cetinye they actually since the beginning of invasion they have been organizing protests daily in support for Ukraine and each day it passes each day that passes they paint one small part of the floor in Ukrainian flag and why am I mentioning this is because they regularly hold banners that say Putin is not Russia and Lukashenko is not Belarus and that's something that we must underline but this is not why I actually asked for a word I asked for a word to give props to one organization that has been really effective since the 80s until early 2000s which is Animal Liberation Front which we have a lot to learn from animal rights organizations they are the fastest growing social justice movement after all according to the statistics so I want to give a legacy and tribute to them by stating some facts that usually people don't know that are outside of this area of thinking is that so they had a policy not to harm any life human or non-human animal it doesn't matter but they were doing economic sabotages meaning they were destroying the labs that abuse animals slaughterhouses and so on and so on and then they were sending footage of those laboratories stolen footage to independent media that releases them so they would even get public support for that economic sabotage and they would cost those laboratories millions literally and they ended up shutting down a lot of fur farms a lot of slaughterhouses and a lot of labs they were really efficient until especially in USA until US government pronounced them as top one domestic terrorist threat organization that never harmed any life and on that list below them in domestic terrorism there were for example white supremacists KKK there were those Christian lunatics that set abortion clinics on fire and threatened to kill women who are undergoing abortions and so on and so on so they somehow managed to lower their influence but those tactics were really efficient and this is my tribute to animal liberation front go google it and you will find some good ideas for your activism Thank you Dushan and just a reminder to those of us those of you who are watching out there that we're talking about what we can do to confront the impact of the war in Ukraine in terms of actions that everyday people can partake in grass roots action so if you out there have knowledge of examples of actions that you think could make a difference that are winnable or if you know what are the key battles where is the establishment weakest anything any best practice case studies please throw them in the chat and we'll cite them to our panel Thank you Thank you everyone and hi everybody maybe just a few comments firstly answering to your question you mentioned earlier the key weaknesses of the establishment specially around corporations that are listed is around the time of the annual shareholder meetings quarterly revenues and so on and so forth with the CEO financial director and the whole horse of people are waiting on a presentation for calls that can be made by anybody in the world and that's a very important time that one can send a direct message and of course it's all live recorded and so on and so forth so that's maybe one of the subversive ways that only needing a few minutes of people's time to get involved is maybe not too complicated information in the phone numbers everything is public so this was some of the easy ways touching on this was one of the recent actions we did in the Netherlands was related to a major financial corporation where we did a petition line and this is quite effective primarily because we're dealing directly face to face in a peaceful manner with the employees of the corporation that was investing in the migration wall in Poland and so that human eye to eye contact and delivering of a small pamphlet and a 5 second message the reaction from the people that we talked to was really amazing and most of them didn't know that the company was financing the wall and that immediate if you like next step of researching this and raising of the consciousness again that's what the establishment is especially in a hot labor market where there's a war over talent we as individuals and as groups and as societies and families and so on and so forth can exercise our power by pulling our labor out of these exploitative companies and organizations and that also goes to the military service persons who are voluntarily getting involved in this war they don't have to you know we always talk about this and reminding that the war on terror you know waged by the United States and its NATO allies led to around 5,000 NATO and US personnel dying but another 35,000 committed suicide so we know that the end of the road and any of these service personnel who are doing this voluntarily is quite clear for them if not dead at least in life hell on life if you like so there's a we as a society have this responsibility especially in a time now when the US defence budget is already mushrooming to almost 850 billion already bipartisan support when the German defence ministry's first purchase of armaments from this new special defence fund is the F-35 plane and the reason public reason that has been given is that this plane can carry nuclear weapons so this means that the German government is putting its cornerstone of defence into nuclear weapons sharing and that can never be an answer in a truly human centric and nature centric security system and this is again responsibility of both of a movement of our parties of the people out there to really challenge the assumptions and decision making of the German government right now in putting their safety and security on American nuclear weapons that they're hosting on site and lastly just a little bit on the issue that we're facing right now especially around food security and price inflation we've all seen our gas bills go up by hundreds of euros if not thousands but those are food prices and not only in Europe but also in the Middle East and in North Africa especially countries that rely on Ukrainian and Russian imports of wheat we're talking about 70, 80, 90% of reliance on imported wheat and sunflower oil and so forth and if you're looking at the recent heat wave that we've all snapped we're looking at crop failure in a few months time we're going to have a huge challenges on our on our front and only through united action like we did with the pandemic as much as possible we can deal with this. Thank you. Thank you Amir for sharing your subversive action cookbook something else interesting tactic that we've used also in the past I mean if you're looking at attacking a corporation you can find people that used to work there it's easy to go on LinkedIn or Google or Facebook and find who used to work there and approach them probably via an intermediary. You'll hit a lot of rock but you might get some hit some diamond in terms of people that might be willing to share information that that company doesn't want disclosed. Okay, Juliana Zita from Germany Thanks Mahran Well, I'm still thinking about everything that Amir just said because there are so many important things in there indeed. So I just wanted to add a comment to what even also said for that admire about you know and many of us already have the impact economical impact on people and what I what I really observed also doing this war was that for example social media when people voice their concerns or fears over rising prices that you know often the reaction is that they get chained for it or there's this debate over you know to not be selfish and to think about the Ukrainian people. But I think that many you know don't really understand that many people are in a situation where they have to decide whether to pay their bills or buy food. So and also this fear that we I think all share for good reasons also is not good psychologically for people. So there are a lot of you know let's say devastation that's happening that's not so obvious like the people that are dying in Ukraine. But still you can see that that suicide rates are going up amongst young people you know families are losing their homes. So poverty also long term leads to death or to you know when you're not healthy anymore that leads to death. So I think that the impact of this war will be really very devastating for much more people than those people are focused on solidarity to be solidarity to you know share solidarity with right now in Ukraine. But I think we have to extend that solidarity to everyone who's impacted because at the end to make the real changes we need everyone on board. So this is the time now and I think that middle class and working class and the poor people always go through every crisis and they get forgotten you know because everything focuses on one topic for example healthcare workers aren't paid more than they were during the pandemic or before but everyone has forgotten about them although there was such a big solidarity with them. So I think by you know focusing on solidarity on one thing we shouldn't forget anyone else because in the end this is a collective thing to do to to not have wars in the first place you know I think we have to change a lot and for that we need to understand the position of everyone and where they're in and where they're at and what their problems are not just those who are obvious. Thanks Juliana a couple of questions and comments from the chat. Remember we're looking for concrete suggestions about what DM25 can do but also what anybody out there can do to confront this crisis of the shockwaves of the Ukraine war please lobby to get out of NATO says one one EU country at a time and someone asked do we have a do we have a campaign on this and also a campaign to focus on instead of increasing military budgets to diverse the resources to essential needs like the Green New Deal for Europe. I'm sure you can speak to that Duchenne another suggestion live off grid if possible consume the minimum and share everything you have with others less fortunate than you. Fair enough but I think we're looking for things that we need you know that we could action in the next couple of weeks ideally. Anyway let's continue the discussion Eric Edmund Yes Mehran yeah what I wanted to say really ties into what Juliana was just talking about now which is that in times of you know really severe crisis like what we're living through now and we've seen it a number of times in the last 10 20 years in Europe and across the world you tend to get tunnel vision you only analyze and understand current events based on current affairs so what do I mean by that what Jens was talking about earlier about gas prices gas prices are skyrocketing because of war in Ukraine when in fact energy companies are still making an absolute killing and are equally responsible for those prices as the war or you know looking at the way that we've been attacking Russian oligarchs in Europe as if there is such a thing as a good oligarch and a bad oligarch is Russian that makes them a bad oligarch but you know our oligarchs in the west who have super yachts and have been profiting from wars in Yemen Libya Afghanistan Iraq whatever have you those were somehow good oligarchs and why would we stop at the confiscation of Russian super yachts when we could be confiscating all super yachts you know this kind of like opening up of the discourse and the debate in times of crisis at the same time difficult and also for once plausible you know we've been confiscating these things from the super rich at the blink of an eye you know and nobody's really battered an eyelid and it's imminently possible to do to nationalize these things and we've been told for forever since the left was there conceived that these things are absolutely impossible and you know would lead to the collapse of the world order or whatever else have you so I think it's incredibly important for us not to allow the powers that be the people who are in charge currently to get away with framing this as a political hiccup as something that only is an exception because of what is ongoing in Eastern Europe and afterwards we go back to normal we had a similar conversation when the pandemic started that crisis also opened up a number of possibilities that before we thought we were not there and we had that debate again again it was a missed opportunity for the left and this brings me to the second point which is that masks drop in these circumstances so you know about what is possible and what is and we talked about the confiscation of oligarch property in general this idea that essentially the West has been supporting the Russian regime up until the war in Ukraine buying Russian gas we continue to do so we were engaged in you know very normal trade relations with the Russian Federation as they had bombed Chechnya as they had invaded Georgia and so on and so forth and we drew the line at Ukraine well okay in Georgia we met or Crimea was the first case where we started making some noise but you take my point so and this brings me to my conclusion about what we can should do which is that we shouldn't devolve and water down political action and our political opinions to what is essentially political begging which is split between the people in power and the people who make decisions the people who essentially were on Putin's side until Putin invaded Ukraine and are now pretending to be against him and to be fighting him and to be pushing through sanctions and so on we shouldn't turn to the very same people and ask them for a progressive world this idea that there is us the people and the people in power is kind of proof that we've given up on the idea of democracy and that's really really messed up you know and that's why I think it's very important this second part of the project that we haven't spoken about today which is that we are also creating political parties in different places because it isn't just about making noise demanding for political change from the people in power it's also about becoming the people in power replacing the people in power with somebody else with us with the people that is what a real democracy is about and I think we should remember that and maintain this realization that a period of crisis is giving us as it's given us in multiple occasions whether it was the pandemic, refugee crisis, economic crisis and so on that the people in power are not the people to whom we should be going for solutions but we should instead be developing alternative power structures knew whether it is a movement like the or political parties like the Meras that we're developing in Germany like the one we have in Greece and so on that will take that fight also to the electoral arena rather than hoping that somehow we can persuade the typical actors to shift their stance. Thanks Seri, I take your point on political begging and the inappealing nature of lobbying but let me ask you something what you're describing requires us for example I mean us as DM to give people that option to vote for us I mean we've started a political party in Germany we're going to do it in Italy but in the short term right now is there anything that you think that people can get engaged in short of writing to their MP or waiting for us to give them an option at the ballot box? I think Dushan but essentially I'm not going to repeat what Dushan said because I subscribe to everything that Dushan has spoken about and I don't want to take up more space to repeat what Dushan has been saying and other comrades on the call because essentially what it is is about being uncompromising and that's what it comes down to, that's what I was saying don't take compromise because the people that have been selling us compromise for all these decades are the same people that are now showing us that none of those compromises were necessary and are completely changing the rule book at the blink of an eye saying that oh it's because it's an extreme situation all of these things are suddenly possible be uncompromising and demand real change and be careful who you demand that change from and be aware that often they will pretend to offer it but they won't actually come through and that is where political parties are also important alternative political forces and not just maintaining the same power play and a first step towards the development of those political parties is indeed developing movements that demand in society for the kind of things that those parties can then come and champion because the mainstream political forces won't be able to do it legitimately so the first step is always doing that radical subversive grassroots actions radical subversive electoral offerings dm25.org Lucas February Thanks madam I wanted to talk about compromising Eric I have a little story to tell you about a party in Germany called the greens and I wanted to just take a brief look on what they've been up to over the past few weeks so first of all the German governments of which the greens are a part of they announced as you remember that all of a sudden they found 100 billion years to invest in the real buildings quote unquote in the region of Ukraine then the German minister or the economy Robert Habek from the greens searching around for somewhere that they could send their money to buy some gas maybe somewhere with a better human rights records than Russia at the moment or at least one that's not on the news so much he takes a trip to Qatar and then he closes a deal to buy gas long term as a replacement for Russian gas I don't need to tell you doesn't have a stellar human rights record either in many ways it's as bad as Russia's and then something that struck me quite a lot was this week or last week I saw a post on social media by the greens basically calling on Germans to tighten their belts and to save up on gas and energy as much as possible so that we can lessen our dependence on Russian gas this isn't in a country in which 20% of the population are at risk of poverty and those people who are at risk of poverty have to tighten their belts while they find 100 billion euros to give to the military industrial complex and the oligarchs there and to the oligarchs in Qatar to buy energy and so on and so forth so very quickly I just wanted to expand a little bit because Juliana also touched upon it to give a concrete example of how the establishment is completely out of touch is not fit for a purpose and we need new alternatives and we need a new country as well as we do in Germany now fortunately with Meta25 Thank you Lukas I think we're at the top of the hour right now, Yanis would you like to come back in and wrap up? No, no, wrap up because I think that we all wrapped up together but there's no point for me to sum it up let me link something that was just said about us, Germany and the Greens eating humble pie and going all out to secure fossil fuels from Qatar link this to one of the reasons why DM was put together why we came together back in 2016 we had a major crisis in 2008 worldwide which exposed the complete inability of Europe's financial economic, socio-economic architecture, political architecture to deal with crisis this kind of capitalism that we were finding ourselves in was bound to generate so it was an inevitable crisis as I keep saying and Europe was ill-prepared not only was it ill-prepared because of the oligarchic structure the way the European Union was designed to be a democratic and a cartel-like architecture but not only was it found one day but it doubled down on its oligarchic cartel-like anti-democratic nature through the Troika through the obstinacy of Angela Merkel the radical center that continued to impose socialism for the bankers and a state for everyone else one of the repercussions was the lowest level of investments we kept saying this remember I kept saying this now for years the lowest level of investment in places like Germany compared to the available money so you know if you go to a very poor country in Mozambique or Ghana where there's low level of investment makes perfect sense there's very little money around but in places like Germany to have such low levels of investment in the presence of all these rivers of cash that is a scandal that was a scandal so the austerity policies especially the ones in the south but also in the north coupled with massive liquidity massive money production on behalf of the rich and the financial sector created a Europe which now for 15 years has not been investing in its future think of energy in Germany you know Angela Merkel and the Fukushima disaster hit Japan completely cynically and in order to expand the reach of the CDU into the green's territory into the center and it announced that nuclear power is finished the nuclear power station will all be mothballed now as you know that I am an opponent of nuclear power and so that was not a bad thing but she shut down nuclear without investing in green energy and went into bed alongside with the quasi-criminal SPD together with Schroeder they went into bed with Gazprom and the Russians why because of a policy of not investing because the order liberal model in Germany was one of extracting economic rents from the rest of the world through mercantilist policies based on low costs at home and low wages at home austerity for the workers in Germany and austerity imposed upon the environment through deals with Putin and cynical acts of shutting down nuclear energy without investing in green energy now Germany is paying the price for it and so are we the rest of us so what we talk about regarding the green transition war geo-strategic concerns the faulty architecture of the euro the manner in which austerity has been pursued against the people and against the environment while at the same time plenty of money printing and all of the rich is taking place all of these things are one issue they are not separate issues and they are the issue for which the one issue that caused the M25 to exist we are not a very powerful movement let's admit it we don't have millions of members we should but in terms of analysis we are the only ones who have it part of the left doesn't the greens don't you can see that when they are in power whether it's a series in Greece or the greens in Germany now with Habek that lack of a big picture perspective and lack of basic ethics and integrity mean that the progressives are either never anywhere near power or when they are in power they simply do what everybody else was doing before them so we need to grow the M25 Thank you Yanis and we are going to wrap it up here thank you out there for joining us we have looked today at some concrete tactics for how we here in Europe can deal with the fallout from the war in Ukraine subversive tactics like invading shareholder meetings humanitarian and digital actions like platforms for finding accommodation for refugees, cultural actions and the role of comedy and of course creating new political alternatives radical subversive electoral alternatives and if you want to be part of all of this well we've made it easier for you the website is dm25.org and in a few seconds you can move from watching us to joining us and working with us to confront the establishment and make a real change we try stuff we experiment if it fails it's okay we learn and we come back stronger and we keep trying thank you also for your comments in the chat here please continue the discussion in the comments on the YouTube video we're actively monitoring it and we will see you again same time, same place, two weeks from now