 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another DM25 livestream where we feature progressive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. I'm Eric Edmund, coming to you with my best Maren Kalili impersonation for whom I'm standing in tonight on this rather bleak topic for today's livestream agenda. More and more, we are living as the apocryphal Chinese curse would put it in interesting times. All latent conflicts have resurfaced. In Gaza, Israel's relentless bombardment of innocent civilians is entering its seventh horrendous week and has put the entire region once again on the war footing. In Ukraine, the fight against Russia, which has also given the NATO military bloc renewed relevance and power, is descending to a violent bloody stalemate. These conflicts are testing traditional geopolitical alliances, while also bringing about new ones. Because this century has seen major shifts in world power. On the one hand, we've got the BRICS, which are experiencing a surge in membership interest and indeed actual membership participation, as China, Russia and India have grown stronger and more relevant and influential in the world stage, while Iran has since the Trump administration decoupled from shy Western attempts at cooperation. Then just this Sunday in Argentina, the election of Javier Millay, a self-styled anarcho-capitalist who ran on a platform of ultra-privatization and disbanding of multiple of the country's ministries, including those for education, environment and culture, shows us the lengths we can anticipate capitalists to go to to save their collapsing world order. And of course, this all takes place in the foreground, while our planet's collapsing ecosystem looms large in the background. Is this the end of a world order and it being replaced by a new world disorder? Is this path unavoidable or do progressives still have a chance and can support some hope for real progressive change? Is this the best or the worst of times to go political? And what should Europe's play be called in drama? Our movement's coordinating team is here to send us in the chats and we will get to them as the evening progresses. So let's get cracking. We've got much ground to cover and we will start the evening with Julia Moore from the UK. Julia, over to you. Thanks, Eric. Hello there. Good evening, everybody. Yeah, a challenging introduction by Eric there, but I would like to broaden out the view for us here this evening and for wherever you're dialing in from and joining us. On the 8th of November, Progressive International, our sister organisation, which I'm sure many of you are aware, a fantastic panel, Janice, Jeremy Corbyn joined by other experts. I would urge viewers tonight to take a look at that and the words that obviously only Janice that we've heard here talk about the Middle East, but Jeremy Corbyn talking about the people, power of protest and collective action. And he went through a fantastic list, historic list of where if you think that activism and being on the streets doesn't change structure, then listen to that panel and specifically Jeremy's historic list of the indirect and sometimes delayed and deferred success of people who protest in these huge numbers. And of course the UK in 93 under Jeremy's direction saw the biggest protest, street protest historically between two and three million people against the Iraq invasion at that time. And I would urge people, maybe as a result of our session tonight, which is understandably heavy and important, have a look at that because it is truly uplifting, truly inspiring and really underpins everything that we do. If you think about campaigns, get involved and the call to collective action. And one of the panel also on that discussion was saying, of course, it's an antidote and it's an absolute balance to the continual attempts by home secretaries across Western Europe to control people meeting together. Now, we may not see the instant effects, we may have failures of an instant nature of protest, but indirectly they change things. Of course, the Vietnam Vietnam War, South Africa, of course, is is the history success of that. So please, everybody, have a look at that. It's uplifting. It gives us hope and it puts in context, of course, the current horrors that we're dealing with without trivializing the fact that we have to remember we are talking about human beings suffering and the specific coming back to the Middle East. The specific second point I'd like everybody to be thinking about tonight is also taking a historic view of the Middle East. As a British citizen, I was taught the British establishment history version of the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot delineation. And it's a fascinating journey to go back now with the lens of looking back at that history, seeing the parallels and of course, people in the UK are witnessing the COVID inquiry at the moment, seeing how history repeats itself, learning from that, seeing that structures on the one hand appear to be the same, and yet we can change them referencing what I've said before about protests and the indirect results of what happens when people are brought together. So sort of a plea for a historic brawl brush against the immediate horrors that we're all trying to ameliorate. Thanks, Eric. Thank you. Excuse me. Thanks, Eric. Bless you. Thank you for that more open brush stroke. We're moving on now to Yanis. Yanis Varoufakis coming to us from Athens, our co-founder and head of our Greek political party, Melo25. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, everyone. Thank you all who have joined us in the live stream. All those of you who will be watching us can't through YouTube. I'm going to start with a holistic approach to what's happening in Ukraine and Gaza, because DiEM25, from the first moment, put in strubs across the border and invaded Ukraine. We were very, very clear, and in a way which I think flows important light on what the civilized approach to latent and the common and on the opposite side of the invader, whoever happens to be the invader and whoever happens to be the invader. We said back then, February 2022, that in the same way that we support and we're on the side and we stand with Palestinians whose homes are invaded by the settlers, whose land is taken over by the IDF, the Israeli army, we are standing with Ukraine given Putin's invasion. We do not care what Putin's reasons for invading are. We do not care whether he was provoked or not. He was provoked. There's no doubt. But it doesn't matter. When you violated the national law by invading, whatever your reasons are, you violate international law and you're an invader and we're going to stand against you. It doesn't matter whether Israel was provoked by Hamas. Israel has been violating the national law, flourishing the international law and occupying territory that it has no right to occupy. So it doesn't matter what provoked this Israeli incursion. When Vladimir Putin's troops, air force, army, cannons, when they flattened a hospital in Mariupol, or blocks of flats in various cities from Harkiv, sometimes even Kiev, certainly Mariupol, we called Putin a war criminal for doing that. When Israel did the same and much, much worse in Gaza in terms of the quantity of the shelling and the number of lives, especially children whose lives were lost. Don't forget that in the last six weeks in Gaza, more children have died than in the last five years around the world in any war or skirmish. Close the parenthesis. Well, when Israel did the same in the same way we called out Putin for bombing and taking out hospitals, theaters and so on in Mariupol, we did the same thing when Israel did it. The M25 is consistent, ethically consistent, legally consistent, politically consistent, unlike the European Union and of course the United States. For whom, for the European Union and the United States, war crimes committed by Putin are hideous war crimes. But when committed by Israel, suddenly they become metamorphosed into legitimate self-defense. The West rightly rejects Putin's claim of staging a special operation, not a war, not an invasion, but a special operation in Ukraine. That's correct. It's not a special operation. It is an out-and-out invasion. When he says that he's doing it to denazify Ukraine, even though there are Nazis in Ukraine, as we know that, the Yazov Brigade, are a Nazi brigade. But we laugh in Putin's face when he says that his invasion is justified because he's denazifying Ukraine. In that exact same way, we laugh in the face of Israel and we condemn Israel when it is claiming to be denazifying Gaza by bombarding, you know, a whole population to smithereens. Similarly, for the way forward, deemed to devise policies and recommendations are the only consistent ones. What are we saying in Ukraine and in the Middle East, in Israel-Palestine? Negotiated peace now. Cease fire and a negotiated peace. A just compromise is the only thing that can end an endless war, that it can end war crimes, in Israel-Palestine and in the Ukraine. In the case of Ukraine, the West backs a forever war based on the argument that any concession to Russia is beyond the pale, whether it is to keep Ukraine neutral, not a member of NATO, no deal with Putin. When there is a discussion about Crimea being kicked into the long grass so the United Nations can deliberate about this on the next 20 years, no way, no land for peace, no Crimea for peace is the standard Western line. War until the aggressor falls, right? As if Putin is going to fall. But anyway, in sharp contrast, when the West talks to the Palestinians, what does it say? Land for peace. Give up the tiny slivers of land that were left to you after 1967. Give half of them up. Condemn yourselves to be living in no viable living in Bantustans like South African apartheid was condemning or trying to confine the black population in these Bantustans for peace. What the West probably doesn't realize is that its callous support for Israel's war crimes is double standards when it comes to on the one hand the Palestinians and on the other hand the Ukrainians. They achieve through these double standards and this hypocrisy, two things. The first thing that they achieve is that they make a mockery of the West's condemnation of Putin. Second thing, because the rest of the world never to take the West's claims for caring for human rights, for a rules-based international order, for international law, nobody takes them seriously. Beyond the West's ludicrous double standards and its criminal support of Israel, the question becomes, what does this all mean in terms of geopolitics worldwide, everywhere? I'm going to dismiss the thing of the bricks as a solid block that is countering Western imperialism. The bricks talk left, but walk right. Montess India is not a progressive force. It is not an anti-colonial force. Just ask the people of Kashmir or our comrades across the vast Indian nation. The fact that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are gravitating towards the bricks, even want to become members of the bricks, without ever leaving Washington and the United States and the dollar behind. This is not a victory. The gravitation of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia towards the bricks is not a victory of anti-imperialism commerce. It is not a victory of the decolonization movement. Think of the United Arab Emirates support of the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt. Think of its support of the warlords in Libya. Think of Saudi Arabia's brutal colonization of Yemen and the crimes against humanity that they're committing there. Tragically, the West support of Israel and the West double standards that I mentioned before emboldens everyone who wants to violate political rights and civil liberties in the developing world, as well as international law. The worst progressives, we must realize that the enemy of our enemy may get stronger when our enemy loses credibility as the West is losing credibility today. But that does not make the enemy of our enemy our friend. The geopolitical game as we speak is mainly centered upon a major clash of what I call two digital cloud fiefdoms, cloud-based digital networks of cloud capital. One is Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The other is Chinese. The war in Ukraine and the confiscation of billions and billions and billions of Russian central bank money by the West, by the United States and the European Union has made the Chinese cloud fief very attractive for people like Saudi Arabian princes, United Arab Emirates, Indonesians, Malaysians, and so on. Not just Russians. At the very same time, China remains a great hope for an advanced technologically society that is very effective, there is a habit in China. But there is a good experiment we've got from the end where progressive forces very well spin out the Chinese economy. But when we meet our Chinese friends, we seem to have lost Yanis territory. But at the same time, I put no punches to in criticizing the authoritarians within China, especially the best treatment of Hong Kong university students, the polytechnic students in particular. This is, I think, the right way of proceeding, both in terms of our analysis and our activities, as deemed at five as the progressive international. We have to steer a very fine course between supporting those who are opposing Western imperialism, settler colonialism, and at the same time, we must defend human rights, political rights, and basic international law on war crimes, again, is those who are opposing the United States, but who do not respect those basic humanist principles, which we, the identified, have a duty to hold very dear to our hearts and to fight for. Thanks. Big thank you to Yanis Varoufakis, less so to his not very cooperative internet connection. Hopefully it will recover by the time he comes back to us. Now we continue with the Judith Meyer coming to us from Berlin, Germany. Thank you, Eric. As Yanis said, we condemn war crimes no matter who commits them. And we absolutely reject the idea that something is a war crime, if so-called uncivilized countries do it, but it's not a war crime if the West does it. The West is not particularly civilized, but there are people who say that the whole concept has no sense that war is cruel, that war crimes are inevitable, and we should grow up and accept that. Well, to me it's clear that international law and the Geneva Conventions are inadequate, they're ignored a lot, they're used in specious ways to justify sometimes invasions in other countries, but it does not follow for me that it is naive to support international law and the Geneva Conventions. We should not just accept that war is this way. Because what would happen if we were to accept that? If we just say, okay, it's law of the jungle, nobody cares? Well, I personally wouldn't start to commit massacres, I don't think anyone here would, but we'd have to stop criticizing them. We could no longer say that this country made the crime by bombing a hospital or by denying food to civilians in Gaza or any of these things, it would be much harder to criticize. And the other side is if we do accept and promote international law and the Geneva Conventions, even as inadequate as they are, it immediately becomes an improvement. Even if a majority of people do not believe in them, it would still lead to a net improvement because those people who do believe in them would not be committing war crimes. They would probably stop some crimes from happening if they're embedded in military units, they would otherwise commit them. Or if they can't stop them, they would become whistleblowers. We've seen this, for example, with the amazing video leaked by WikiLeaks from the war in Afghanistan where some American pilots fire on journalists and it was another American, presumably, who leaked this information so that we know about it. This can only happen if this person was convinced that gunning down journalists is wrong. So even if only one in a hundred person has this strong conviction that the Geneva Conventions are worth upholding, we as a humanity gain from this. And I believe that we should promote it more and more and convince people that it's absolutely not naive, but in fact, the reasonable and progressive thing to do to uphold this belief, even if there will be a lot of people that don't believe it. The more people believe it, the harder it will be for any organized military to commit war crimes. And there will be more whistleblowers. Also, if we believe in a Star Trek-like future or any future where humanity has reached a new level, it's possible that war hasn't been completely abolished in this future, like the Federation still fights Klingons, but it's impossible to imagine that the future human civilization is fine with massacring civilians that are no threat to them. It's a primitive thing. It doesn't belong in an enlightened future. So seeing others go back to a more primitive human understanding of what we should do, there's no reason at all for ourselves to move backwards. Thank you. Thank you. You did it. Before moving on to our next speaker, who we understand most from Athens, a couple of questions that are also relevant to what you was just referring to beyond the more philosophical and theoretical approach to rights. There's also the question posed by KP in our chat about the actual systems we have in place for enforcing those rights, namely the United Nations. KP asks, how do we create a different United Nations as the one based in New York City controls the entire world and prevents the enforcement of laws? So what could potentially be a more practical and efficient and effective alternative to the United Nations? Or is there a way of reforming the current United Nations? That's something for our next speakers to keep in mind, please. And the same question comes from Claire, who asks us, isn't apartheid inherent in the state of Israel since it was conceived as a Jewish state as the ultimate quintessential safe place for Jews from all over the world? So is the one state where Jews and Arabs have the same civil and political rights solution not completely impossible? So does the one state solution have a hope of ever being implemented and become a reality? Those two questions to keep in mind. Hello. Thanks, Eric. And thank you, Judith, for giving us a bit of a bright vision in this time of gloom. So I take this opportunity to say that, I mean, there are proposals, there are policies tabled by the Progressive International and DM25 about a different world. We have proposed a new non-aligned movement without any military blocks in favor of collective but indivisible security and global cooperation that will lead to shared prosperity. And to make that happen, there is also the project for the new international economic order. And this is ongoing. So there is a vision, there are ways to get there. The question is, where are we now? And how do we progress from here? In this world in transition where we should see where we belong to the West and we should first recognize that the importance of the West is diminishing. However, the West is still very dangerous for world peace and security. The way it looks to me right now, I mean, this familiar theme, US power is receding, the economic and political center is moving to the East and you have this power system that is losing its grip over the globe and it doesn't want to. Now the problem for Western planners is that the US and the West in general, which let's remind ourselves, who is the West? The West is the US, Canada, the UK, the European Union and then Australia, New Zealand, Japan, not even Singapore anymore, I think. So as the West is losing its grip, it does not have many diplomatic options to actually influence and control. Why? Because of the war on terror, because of US support for Israel, because of all the foreign policy failures. On the other hand, China, that hasn't fired a shot for like 50 years and has the Belt and Road Initiative and when they go to Africa, the Africans say, when the Brits come, we get a lecture. When the Chinese come, we get a hospital or a university. They have diplomatic capital, they promote peace, they promote cooperation, they promote trade. So we're already seeing that countries across the world, when they do have, and Singapore is a case in point, when they do have a choice, they will rather not take sides, which basically favors China. But what I'm trying to get at is that the West does not have any diplomatic options, but they have many military options. The US has hundreds of bases around the world and it seems that they don't wanna let go of their power and their control. So there is an urgency on their side to enter the military arena before they lose the game on the purely economic and international relations ground. So this is why we are part of Europe. I mean, the EU, the EU governments are part of a power system that is very dangerous at the moment, and this brings us to Europe. We have established in the end, we say it openly, that we are a basal of the United States. Foreign policy and other major decisions about Europe are not taken by Europeans, and this needs to change. I should remind everyone that going into the EU elections next year, a big DM motto and part of our policy narrative, which was actually voted just now in an old member vote, is an independent Europe with independent citizens. And this kind of political, geopolitical independence is very important both for us, but also to save the world as it were, because as US power receipts, what they're doing, and it's only natural, is they're cannibalizing on their closest allies. I mean, Europe has gained nothing from the war in Ukraine, from supporting Israel. At the same time, we're expending people, resources, credibility, our future. And there's nothing in it for us. So the first duty of us as Europeans is really to fight for an independent Europe. And then, and also acknowledge our receiving significance, like European population is about 5, 7% of the total. Economically, we used to be on par with the US, now we're like, what, 60% of that GDP? Acknowledge the crimes that Europeans have done in the past, and when, and if we manage to become independent, we can also contribute to peace and stability in this world. Thanks. Thank you, Anos. We have a couple of more questions coming in from our chat. What can we, asks Doug from the US, common people do to help the progressive international movement achieve this reality that we are describing in this chat. And then a follow-up question, he's heard Yanis talk about doing general strikes against the likes of Amazon, for example, to give power to individual workers. But he asks, won't the capitalist fight to the death to stop that kind of thing from being successful? How do we react to that? So those two more questions from Doug, you keep in mind as we move on to Amir Kiay from The Hague in the Netherlands. Thank you, Eric. That last question was actually very interesting, because, and we know this also from the COVID pandemic, that essential workers are the everyday nurses, teachers, educators, cleaners, collectors, garbage collectors, et cetera. Whereas the ones that we talk about capitalist, like bankers, they're not really that essential. So there was some of you that maybe have gone into the history of this. There's only been I think once ever in the history of strikes that bankers went on strike. And that I think lasted six months because they were not as essential as they thought they were. Compared to, you can imagine if garbage collectors go on strike for more than a day or two. And people will react, when I was living in New York City, the garbage collectors went on strike for one day and that was enough to get their demands met. And in talks we had with some of the unions through our discussion that we have with the conferences, et cetera. We sometimes discuss this idea of, look, if the bathroom workers in the European Parliament go on strike, things can actually really change because that's not gonna see a parliamentarian do the dirty work. And sometimes we are not using our labour power as we should be. And that's maybe a bigger topic for discussion about the role that unions use to play and play at the moment and so on and so forth. So a bigger discussion, maybe I'm not gonna open that up now and sort of stay on topic. I mean, look for tonight's talk, I was thinking about pre-1945 and pre-discurrent global order. I was thinking of 1904. In 1904, the Heroro people in Namibia rose up against the German occupiers and colonialists. What happened there was that the Germans, after they rose up against the Germans, the Germans responded forcefully and drove hundreds of thousands of people into the Namibian desert. They, where they died from thirst, from dehydration and starvation. And the few that were left were brought back and kept in the concentration camps where they died of disease, abuse and exhaustion. Then the skulls of those people were sent to Germany for further research to prove racial superiority. In 1904, equally in the Congo, if you worked in the rubber, if you were a slave, in the rubber plantations and you did not meet your quota of rubber, your family would be taken hostage. And if you did not meet your quota the next day, they would chop the hands off and the legs of your family members. And this was in 1904. And unfortunately, we are maybe have modernized these mechanisms. We are no longer manually chopping off the hands and feet of the people. But we see this every day in front of our eyes with what's going on in Gaza. And so sometimes I think we're not moving as fast as forward as we think we have in terms of progression. We've just maybe become more technologically superior in that sense. At the same time, there's been enormous progress. Of course, we always talk about the enormous progress humanity has made through struggle, through action, through strikes, through coming out on the streets. Every single freedom we have today, the fact that we have annual leave, for example, if one is working, the fact that we have pensions, the fact that we have social security, the fact that we have some level of semblance of healthcare may be in different levels, of course, in Europe and elsewhere, but we have it. The fact that we have an ambulance service, for example. The fact that we have a fire hydrant service. All those things came through struggle, people demanding it and struggling and uniting and organizing around and getting those things. It just wasn't offered to them. The king didn't come and say, here, I'm gonna be benevolent and give it to you. We're not gonna see the same thing from Ursula from the lane and her explicit term for her team and so on. What we see, for example, what Joseph Borel did in an interview on Al Jazeera, he was asked, what do you think of Hamas's war crimes? He says, yes. What do you think of Israel's war crimes? He says, I'm not an international lawyer. And so this is the level of leadership that we have at the moment, and that's one of the targets we have is to force the resignations of these leaders, so-called leaders. And we have to say, enough is enough and get them out. And just to finish off, the last thing I want to say is that it means everything we have to do, we have to work across borders to bring an end to the impunity. And for example, this Friday, the M25 members are linking virtual arms with First Nations in Salafika. We will be protesting outside the Amazon offices in Amsterdam and our comrades in Salafika will also be protesting outside Amazon offices in Cape Town. And it means breaking the fear barrier and speaking out against barbarism. And here I'm reminded by Iris Hefts and the communist others of Jewish faith who are being detained for saying not in our name. Thank you. Thank you very much, Amir. And thank you for mentioning the Make Amazon Pay campaign, which Diem has been helping push together with our sister organization, Progressive International around the world. It brings together over 80 organizations and I think something like 400 parliamentarians from around the world, representing in total with those organizations, tens of thousands of workers and supporters to make Amazon pay and disturb not only the organization itself but its entire supply chain around the world. Of course, Make Amazon Pay, the Progressive International in Diem 25, all independent organizations can only remain independent because they're financially independent, meaning that we only survive off the contributions and the donations that we receive from the people that support us. That means you. So another way that of course you can help is with a very vulgar but of course, eternally necessary way of donating and helping us continue our work both in Europe and of course across the world. So with that, we move away from the Netherlands to the South to France and Grenoble where Delfine Dalkara lives. Delfine, over to you. Hey, thanks Eric and thanks everyone. Just really enjoying all the nice vocalizations that has been done until now and like feeling kind of pumped up on what Amir has been saying. And I think it's very interesting, not interesting but important, let's say to underline how essential it is to get out there any way you can. I think for too long at the incunity that the ruling classes today are enjoying so shamelessly as maybe never as more their hubris has been so visible to so many as it has been these last few days and I think people are getting fed up and getting outside and this impunity that these the working classes, the ruling classes have enjoyed for so long, I think as a secondary effect has had this apathy in the 99% that like these, we can never, I mean democracy is a farce and we could never get in front of this disaster that we're living through. But I guess kind of going off on what's been said, like struggle and resistance is like, it's a muscle and it is true that we've stopped flexing these muscles as societies for a long time and the more we flex them, the stronger and harder they will become and we will learn, even though things might seem like impossible, not trying is defeat in the worst kind while as we will fail, we will fail better and better and better, we just have to continue to start moving these muscles and start learning our body again as the 99% per se. So I think that's very important. On a separate note, I just wanted to kind of touch upon now a negative note, a pessimistic note that how much I'm worried about like an increasing transfer into like a militarization and like a war economy that we're headed towards. And this is coming in a time that never more we needed more investment in our societies for climate change and everything and this increasing escalation in conflicts and the arms sales that feed these conflicts should really, it's so revolting that it should infuriate us all. And I want to share a bit of a ironic anecdote, let's say that today I was looking, I saw that Germany has pledged another 1.4 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine. And then I was asking myself how much has it been in total now. I came across an interesting website saying Ukraine support tracker and Germany has now in total support over just over 20 billion. And ironies of ironies today, at the same time German Supreme Court has refused to allow the German government to spend the 20 billion euros it had put aside for climate change that would require investments into storage technologies and rail upgrade. So it's almost like we're kind of stuck in this hell where like the only expenditure we're allowed is for war. And I think more and more people are becoming aware of this and yeah, join us, join others, get out there guys, thanks. Thank you for that rallying cry, Daphne. If the absurdity of the political system that we live in isn't a rallying cry for action, I don't know what is. Let's go to my good Brussels neighbor, David Castro David. Thanks Eric. Really loved what Daphne had to say there and also what Amir said before. I think it's really spot on, only through struggle can we win against the powerful. It seems like, I mean against the powerful, right? Because when we unite, we're actually more powerful than they are. It seems like a cliche to say that, but it really isn't. It's literally how it's always been and it isn't about to change. I don't think we have to go and reinvent the wheel there. I think that's literally how we have to act going forward. That is the way. And as Daphne mentioned, impunity exists because there is no organized international struggle because who wants to struggle? I mean, it sounds difficult and tiring, but if we're honest with ourselves, that's what we have to do. We have to do it. There's no other way around making that change to this horrible system, which I'm about to describe as well. Our democratic systems across the world, they've been systematically disfigured, not by chance, but by deliberate design. This manipulation, which has been orchestrated by power hungry leaders has distorted the very essence of our governance. Look around, I mean, the meteoric rise of the far right in Portugal just now, Austria, Italy, Argentina, you name it. And also the near victory in France last time around. They're not random events. They are the symptoms of a democracy in peril. This alarming trend is the outcome of an archaic system, audacious for all the reasons I would say. And I think we became entrapped in a kind of mirage of an ideal world rather than actually constructing it. If you look around today, we inhabit a world facade really where real conspiracies, not mere theories govern our lives and suppress the many for the benefit of the few. Our current system deterses from questioning those in power, seducing us with the illusion of joining the elite if we simply work hard enough. Yet this relentless pursuits blinds us to the plight of those for whom such aspirations are not just unattainable, but quite honestly ludicrous. Our real battle lies in breaking free, I think, from this illusory state and remaining aware of the ongoing class struggle and linking arms internationally, which is precisely what Amir and Daphne and others have said. We must, we have to reject the deceptive narratives fed to us and fight for a democracy that truly represents interests and well-being of all people, not just the privileged few. This is precisely why this is the perfect time when the world is literally crumbling to join movements like ours, not just to make yourselves and ourselves feel better that we're doing something but to actually do it. So if you haven't done it yet, head over to our website, join us, get involved, be part of the struggle because that's the only way we're going to transform this world and it doesn't have to be tiring all the time. It doesn't have to be also difficult every day. There's a lot to be gained from that and human connection is at the top of that and it's what we all need. So do join us, get involved and let's do something because the world needs it. Thank you. Thank you, David. We're also pushing for a bit of happiness and joy and fun in the revolution. Let's go back now to Judith Meyer for one last intervention before we return to Yannis who will wrap us up tonight. Judith. I want to draw, I think it's incredibly important what David just said and Daphne about the need to stand together internationally in order to effect this change. And I would bring one example, actually two examples which I believe will become one more important. One is from the Indian fight for independence. There was this person, Banerjee, who was arrested by police as he was demonstrating and somehow I'm not exactly sure his fate became known to a famous Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, who wrote a whole epic about this Indian independence fighter. And then from the Turkish poem, we get a 70s Greek song again about this one person being arrested on the street. And I imagine this was before the internet. This was long before any kind of international kind of coordination. How these people even hear about the injustice committed by the British against a single protester. It is unimaginable, but it does work. And this way Greeks nowadays still know this song. It is one of the known songs of the Greek left which is about the police arresting this one Indian guy which came to Greece through Turkey, through a famous Turkish poet. So it is quite fascinating and something similar happened just a few years ago with Black Lives Matter was another such thing where there's just one person, just one injustice in another continent and then the entire world starts demonstrating. So we just have to find these tipping points and we have to be organized in order to take advantage of them, but it is possible, especially now with all these beautiful new possibilities that we have online with the way the world is connected. I believe that we can do it. This is the time. Thank you, Judith. As a Greek, I'm not surprised that Greeks know about it. I'm more surprised that the German knows that the Greeks know that goes to further show I think the power of culture and of art in transmitting these messages. So with that beautiful message, let's head back to Athens and Yanis to wrap us up tonight. Yes. I was very much taken by India through Nazim Hitt. The solidarity and before the internet. You see, I have a very weird theory about the internet. It has made no difference. We have exactly the same degree of communicating with one another, even though now we have these amazing tools because you see these tools come with a lot of noise which cancels out the signal. So in the end, I have this homeostasis view that we have not gained anything in terms of the speed and efficiency with which we communicate across the world in the last 200 years. I'm all in favor of the technologies, you know, but because of the parallel increase in noise and signal, we're exactly where we were before, which is in a sense quite romantic. And, you know, it gives us a sense of continuity. The struggle continues. It doesn't matter how advanced our applications are and our phones. We have to keep doing what people were doing a hundred years ago. But this is not why I asked to take the floor again. It's something that definitely said regarding, definitely let me remind you said quite correctly that whereas the German government has pledged around 20 billion to the war in Ukraine, at the same time, the constitutional court in Kalsui in Germany effectively struck off 20 billion from next year's federal budget in Germany that was going to be spent on climate change. Well, let me, for once, I'm going to side with the judges and point out a serious threat to democracy. You see, when the bourgeoisie, when the ruling class tries to use the law and especially the constitution, which is a very powerful law because you need two thirds majority usually in order to overturn it, to change it, right? So you need the super majority to change. When the bourgeoisie uses the constitution in order to shrink the capacity of the electorate to channel resources to the needs of the many, to the needs of the planet, while at the very same time, allowing for all sorts of resources to be thrown into the lap of the oligarchy of war mongers, of the arms trade, right? That's what you end up with. What happened in Germany is not that the constitutional court decided that you can spend money on war but you cannot spend it on the green transition. No, it is the idiotic social democrats who 20 years ago, in order to prove themselves more a royalist than the king, than the royal family, more Austrian than the Christian democrats, introduced a debt break in the constitution of Germany. Effectively, they introduced limits on the deficits of countries, of countries, of the federal republic that were put into the constitution. Now that is a stupid thing to do. The social democrats are the stupidest political force in the history of the planet. It's effectively like sawing off the branch of the tree on which you're standing. This is what they managed to do. Because you see the thing is that if you impose a constitutional ban on a deficit, what is a deficit? A deficit is a subtraction. You take your tax take and you subtract from that your expenditure, right? And you say that that subtraction must yield, never yield a negative number. So you take an endogenous variable and you put it in the constitution. So then what happens is there has to be violations of this, like when COVID happened, they suspended the debt break. But of course, and then they created shadow budgets for putting expenditure which was necessary but which was there in order to bypass the constitutional ban on having such bad budgets. Where do you start a process like that? Who is going to be able to violate the constitutional controls? The military industrial complex. Not those who want to spend on climate, not those who want to spend on education, not those who want to spend on health. Time and again, in the last 50 years of what we call neoliberalism, it is the social democrats, the labor parties that have managed to injure the capacity of social democrats to carry out their program. It was the Australian government under the labor party which introduced fees in universities and then Tony Blair copied that in the United Kingdom. The result is the working class has no access to education anymore, finished. And who suffers from this? The social democrats. So yeah, this is concentrates the mind of progressives about the use of constitutions in particular, but the law in general, and the institutions of the bourgeois state in order to ensure that the public, the demos, is not participating in the so-called democracy. And that's what DM25 must fight tooth and nail against and do join us to do it. Join DM25. Thank you very much, Yanis. And I think as a wrap-up, that things could be much worse than they are today. And of course, there's a much space for improvement is as good a rallying cry as any. I would like to take this opportunity to launch a fundraising campaign to connect Yanis to satellite internet. So go on Twitter and write hashtag Starlink, have other financial priorities right now like getting elected to the European Parliament. Let's direct that. But after June, after June, perhaps. Thank you all for joining us tonight. Your support is what keeps us going. Thank you to our panel for their contributions to this very challenging topic. And as always, we'll see you at our next meeting two weeks from now for another DM25 livestream. Until then, take care and see you then.