Yanis Varoufakis's authoritarian dark side

0:00The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal.

0:33the new statesman

0:38hi yanis ollie doug moore here from the new statesman really looking forward to seeing you later obviously plenty for us to talk about whether it's war uh it's illegality the economic fallout but i think the thing i'm most looking forward to talking to you about is raising your soul and choosing the path of most resistance. What can we learn if we choose the path of most resistance? Like I said, anyway, looking forward to seeing you. Take care. Bye-bye. Hi, Oli. I'm very much looking forward to this discussion, especially about raising one's soul, because that thing is more important at a time when our souls are so down in the dumps with everything that's happening at home and abroad.

1:20Yes, let's talk about anything you want. Last week, Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and darling of the European left, turned 65. He celebrated his birthday on stage in London by gathering figures from across the left. Zach Polanski was there. Jeremy Corbyn was there. Varoufakis' mission? To explore what resistance means for the left today. I sat down with him the next day in the New Statesman's studio to talk about that mission, to talk about fascism, whether it can be applied in today's modern context, his childhood growing up in a fascist dictatorship, the strategic importance of Cyprus for the war in the Middle East, for Britain, the US, Israel, Iran, and Greece and Turkey.

2:06I'm Oli Dugmore. You're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. Here's my conversation with Yanis Varoufakis. Yanis Varoufakis, hello. How are you? pretty well all things considered almost um you know uh guilty that uh in the midst of war and stagnation and fascism rising up i'm personally okay i wish to talk to you about all of those things you listed alongside your personal content um i want to talk about your book raise your soul i want to talk to you about war i want to talk to you about fascism let's start with the book okay why do you like Nazi war planes so much you know how boys are I grew up in the 60s the television or actually the movies we didn't have television when I was growing up not just me and my family Greece didn't have television it came in 1969 you know the cinemas were full of war movies so you know the Stuka was you know it was a Stuka and a Spitfire and you know so But I think what you're alluding to is that this is the opening pages of my book.

3:18When I was about nine, my mother took me in a taxi to the northern suburbs of Athens to a boutique hotel that had been commandeered by the Greek Gestapo. We lived under a fascist dictatorship at the time, which, by the way, was a NATO member state. Let's not forget that. to visit my favorite uncle, her brother. And, you know, I saw him. He had just been through horrendous torture. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for resisting the regime. And he had made, he was an engineer, quite an accomplished one. He had made out of matchsticks and carton paper from cigarettes. He had managed to make a paper model, an airplane model, out of paper and matchsticks of Estuka.

4:16And he presented it to me and I was elated by that until I realized that it was a ruse. What was it a ruse for? well firstly he had painted the swastika and the iron cross beautifully on top of it and the reason why he did it was because our well his centuries were nazis they were greek nazis and they appreciated that so they let me have it on the way out from that prison and of course one of them had to indulge his deep-seated evil by grabbing it as if it was a paper plane threw it at the wall. That was his way of essentially baiting my mum to respond so that he could beat her up. It was a very brutal regime.

5:13My mother didn't respond. She picked it up. She gave it to me. We took it home. And then when I was just hoping that my dad and my mom would help me fix it, put it back together. They dissected it to discover, to find a message from my uncle to his comrades hoping to coordinate their defense at the court-martial that followed. So I was being used, but it was very exciting, you know. You know, people think, oh, what terrible events to have marked their childhood. They're dead wrong. Yeah, I remember all that, like a great adventure. Your uncle had participated in a bombing campaign, right, against the dictatorship.

5:55Yeah. And if I understood correctly, your mother was opposed to that use of violence in a way. She was skeptical of it. She didn't celebrate violence, but she didn't condemn it either because we lived in a very violent regime. what was interesting about my uncle unlike my dad who was a committed lefty who had spent four years in a concentration camp for left wingers back in the 1940s my uncle was an establishment figure you know, thinking back decades afterwards of that character, my uncle it really is now allowing me to understand the architecture of power of authority of establishment culture much, much better because he was, up until 1967, when the tanks rolled on our streets and the constitution was suspended and Parliament was shut down, he was, in British terms, on the verge between the Tories and Farage.

6:59So he was a rightist who nevertheless believed that authoritarianism on the part of the state was an essential cog in the machine that kept democracy going. So in the same way that Roosevelt used to refer to Latin American dictators as bastards, but they are our bastards because we're keeping the commies out. You know, he has also the belief, which is also a Thatcherite belief, that to preserve liberalism, you need a state that is authoritarian. Remember 1984, the miners' strike and so on. So that was his view until the thugs that he considered to be the centers of bourgeois democracy took over the government, suspended the constitution.

7:47And that's when he flipped. By the way, he was a very high ranking member of the establishment. He was the CEO of Siemens in Greece and Southern Europe, the German multinational corporation. and that effectively made him even more important than the minister of the state because Siemens constructed the whole of the telephone system in Greece and the whole of the power generation distribution system in Greece. So when he entered the minister's office, the minister of industry and trade, right, he was treated like royalty, like, you know, a foreign dignitary. He had more power than the minister.

8:24And therefore, when one day he turned up at the ministry with a Samsonite full of semtex, because he was dealing even with the dictators, the ministry under the fascist dictatorship. And, you know, at some point he, excuse himself, he used the personal private toilet of the minister and planted the bomb and took out the whole floor, the whole top floor of the ministry at four o 'clock in the morning. Nobody got hurt. But yeah. So my mother was supremely critical of him as a stalwart of the establishment who believed in thugs keeping democracy going before his transformation. And she was skeptical of him afterwards.

9:12But at the same time, she was proud of him. So, you know, in this day and age of identity politics, of Either you are with us, the George W. Bush doctrine, or you're against us. You know, my mother introduced me to the idea of being nuanced and being critical while at the same time having the capacity to take a position of supporting, let's say, the anti-regime struggle and not condemning his bombs, even if you're skeptical about his bombs. I want to talk more about paradox and being comfortable with contradiction in a second. And there's a really striking part in the book where you talk about how your mother sort of was skeptical or critical of your uncle up until the moment she sort of witnessed him incarcerated.

10:00That was really moving. But if we could just dial into armed resistance for a moment, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, how you think about violence in a political context and whether or not armed resistance is a valid part of a liberation struggle. How do you think about that? Well, I am constitutionally opposed to violence. That is, I have a serious problem with violence. But at the same time, I can't say that violence should ever be used because I experienced, you know, the tanks coming down Patision Avenue in Greece in November 1973, crashing the students, machine gunning demonstrators.

10:43and you know anybody who says to me that well the demonstrations don't have the right to resist violently you know opposing violence with violence it's that's something that that's for me a bridge too far so the question is where do you draw the line and i think we draw the line when you've exhausted all possibilities of maintaining basic standards of human dignity without resorting to values. We're nowhere near that in Western Europe now, even though we have obnoxious authoritarianism by our authorities. We can see what's happening here with Palestine action, what's happening in Germany, where colleagues of yours have been rendered non-persons for having written about Palestine.

11:28I was banned from entering Germany. We're nowhere near that threshold yet, but that doesn't mean that that threshold doesn't exist. let's talk about those contradictions then i'd like to quote some of your writing about your mother and uncle's relationship you write she knew how to love and to loathe him without allowing the contradiction to destabilize her to make her lose her moral poise can you talk to me a little bit about that about sitting with about tolerating paradox i mean you alluded to it in your previous answer but and the way that it sits in our modern political context but i just i found that really striking because that did make me wonder whether we've perhaps lost a little bit our ability to sit with contradictions like that yes uh taking that that that example um my uncle was uh highly patriarchal disgustingly patriarchal a very sweet man uh very right wing nauseatingly right wing for me but at the same time somebody who went his own side crossed the threshold that we talked about, he took up arms at great cost to himself against them.

12:37Somebody who, after the collapse of the dictatorship, he had so much political capital because anybody who was a resistor, a resistance fighter, with that kind of social position as well, right? He wasn't just a worker in a factory. He was a CEO of a major multinational. You know, he could have walked into a ministry. He could have become elected. He could have become a minister of state. He could have become highly fated. But he decided not to use any of that and to fade into oblivion because he was worried that in the post Bretton Woods world after the 1970s with the coming of neoliberalism, he knows his own side of the upper echelons of the capitalist class were contributing to society's steady decline.

13:27So you can take any of these bits to celebrate him or to condemn him. And what my mother taught me, and this is why I need to write this book, and it wasn't just my mother, it was another four women in this book that taught me that, is how to resist authoritarianism, chauvinism, the male chauvinist big within me, because we all have it, we boys, the fascists that we have in us you know the authoritarian we all have an authoritarian dark side how to resist all that and resist it in other people without losing the capacity to celebrate the human aspects of various people I'll just give you another example much more recent I spent some time a couple of days about a week ago with Emil Kustorica the renowned former Yugoslav film director whose movies marked my you know youth and you know some of my own comrades in my political party accused me of you know having hobnobbed with a nationalist a Serb nationalist you know what you know what I don't mind because you know let's say you had an opportunity to spend a weekend with Picasso who was a misogynist and pretty vile person but he was also Picasso or with let's say Dostoevsky who was a very dark character I'm sure he there were really nasty aspects about it We should be able to transcend the black and white.

14:53If you're not with us, you're against us, logic. And to extract all the nuggets, the golden nuggets of humanity from others while standing our ground when it comes to nationalism. We'll fight nationalism to the death. You mentioned it there. Throughout Raise Your Soul, you repeatedly turned to female role models for inspiration. I mean, could you just talk to me a little bit about that choice to center and foreground women in the book? Why did you choose to do that? I didn't set out to do that. 2023, 2024 were pretty nasty years in my life. For the first time, probably ever. Well, maybe not since 1984 when I used to leave this country and we lost the miners' strike and that was pretty depressing.

15:36But since then, I hadn't been so depressed as I was in 2023, 2024. We had several electoral defeats. It doesn't matter why. I was a bit low. And when I am low, I write. It's my therapy. And I enjoy writing mostly when I'm writing for no particular reason. I don't have a plan. It's not because I have a book contract. It's not because I'm committed to some kind of magazine or periodical to write. So therapy for me means, okay, now what's going to make my soul feel better? I was harboring a certain guilt over my mother because my penultimate book, Technofedialism, was written as a long form letter to my father, who was an inspiration and so on.

16:28But then when I finished writing that, which was all a conversation with my dead father, I felt, you know, I've devoted so much time to my dad. but where's my mom because she was my political mentor the real political mentor in my family was my mom not my dad and so i was harboring that i was depressed and i said okay when was the first time that she surreptitiously politicized me and i came up with that story of you know when she took me to that leafy suburb in northern athens to meet her brother so i started writing this for therapeutical purposes it wasn't going to be a book and so when i told the story of that visit in that hotel.

17:07Then I kept going because I was enjoying it. I was feeling much better. I remembered the expression she used to say to tell me when she felt that I needed a bit of an uplift, raise your soul. So I kept writing it. So, you know, after 20 pages, I had written more or less a short chapter on her story. And it finishes that, I mean, it evolved into telling the story of how she met my dad. And of course, at that point, the thought came, of course, to me, not to you, that, okay, now, my father, who was so inspirational also, so much so that I wrote the whole book addressing him, debating him. Well, his mentor was his mother, whom I never met because she died in the 1950s.

17:58But nevertheless, she was very influential on me through him. So I started writing her story. So one thing led to another. And I had a book that started in 1993 when Anna, my father's mother, who, by the way, was a card-carrying member of the Egyptian Feminist Union because she was born and raised and died in Cairo, where my father was born and raised, from 1923 to the 1960s, 97s, where I existed. And then I thought, OK, well, I'll take this a bit further because I was enjoying it. So I brought in my mother's mother who actually raised me, a peasant girl from the Peloponnese. And that took me to my English years.

18:40And I was hooked. So then I brought another woman. And then I ended up writing a history of the last 100 years through the eyes of those women. And I realized that their influence in civilizing me as a member of the defective sex, a man, was essential in the way that I understand the world and the way in which I try to relate to the world. So, you know, this is how it ended up a book, which is trying to explain how a boy grew up through the influence of women that, you know, had the capacity to raise our souls and also to keep us nuanced while remaining steadfast. And to constrain perhaps that dark space you were talking about a couple of answers ago.

19:29You recently said on fighting misogyny, you said it got better and then it got worse. Can you talk to me about that cultural shift? What do you mean by that? Well, haven't you experienced that in your lifetime? Yes. I mean, there was a time when we thought that outright woman-hating was passé. It was simply not done, that it was unfashionable, that anybody who dared, you know, proclaim that women should go back to their home and that they are somehow constitutionally, biologically inferior and their job is to just beget kids and educate them to some extent until, you know, they are salvaged by a patriarchal university and military system.

20:10It was, you know, I grew up in a fascist dictatorship that had that view. Then we got out of it. Then the second wave of feminism supposedly won. And, you know, we reached the stage when we thought we could take it for granted that explicit misogyny, the manosphere, was a thing of the past in the same way that slavery was a thing of the past. Not that authoritarianism and exploitation had gone. But and now it's all back. And it's all back at the same time as fascism and military Keynesianism. i'm going to revisit this in a moment last year uh reflecting on 2025 you identified three upsets for in the foreign policy arena in which donald trump could be identified as the victor in his in his view you spoke about russia's victory in ukraine as you saw it um you spoke about the trade war as relates to with china where china won yes against trump on the on on on chips and elsewhere and then you also spoke about european submission in that same trade war i would just invite you to reflect on those remarks in the context of the attacks that are now taking place against iran and how you contextualize what's happening here as it relates to trump and then i want to bring in the masculinity conversation in in a moment well by the way i'm not celebrating any of this.

21:38What I said in December 2025, a few months ago, was that the lessons of 2025 are that President Xi of China won the trade war with the tariff war with Trump. Trump won the tariff war with the European Union and Putin won the discursive war regarding Ukraine. Not that he took give, thank goodness, but you know the Europeans are absolutely, they're totally clueless about what to do with Ukraine. So the Putin narrative is winning over, at least in the global South and also in the United States under Trump. What Trump has done however by essentially being, allowing himself to become co-opted to Israel.

22:31This is what happened. I mean, you heard Joe Kent. It's really very simple. The argument was that Israel is going to bomb Iran. Then Iran is going to retaliate against the United States. So because Israel is going to violate international law, we have to do it too. And essentially, he deleted his success of his first term. The only success he had in his first term was he didn't allow himself to become coopted by Netanyahu in another war in the Middle East, especially with Iran. It is only it's my considered opinion that Trump was winning everything until he allowed himself to be dragged into this war by Netanyahu.

23:17And now he's going to lose everything. I think that now his political project is finished, kaput. Okay, let's talk about that then. My read of that, and I think you might be alluding to domestic politics, is that there's this key plank in the MAGA base, and it's the nationalist populist one. If we think about the polls that exist there, you've got the broligarchy, the bros, the tech bros, the tech billionaires in Silicon Valley. You've got the nationalist populist embodied by people like Steve Bannon, etc. And there's probably a third one as well, which is kind of Christian nationalists, white nationalists, etc.

23:51So is it your contention that essentially that central plank, that nationalist populist piece of the base that is against forever wars, it is against foreign military entanglement, it is pretty explicitly isolationist, that by participating in this project that he is alienating that part of his base? Is that your contention? Yes. Well, look, he has been betraying the blue collar base of the MAGA movement since day one. If you look at the Big Beautiful Bill, for instance, it was a piece of class war against his own base. He has decimated them. But it wasn't enough to derail his project because he had the tech oligarchs.

24:32He had Wall Street on his side and he could still do things like, you know, Abduck Maduro and pacify part of the blue collar base on the basis of patriotism. Oh, look, we are winning. But, you know, when the average Trump supporter travels 100 and 110 miles to go to work and come back, that's the average. and they barely make ends meet with the bullshit jobs that they have. David Graber is a scientific term. And you double petrol prices. You just, they can sustain for a week, but they cannot sustain it for months. They simply can't make ends meet. They just can't put food on the table. So he's going to lose these people if he hasn't lost them already.

25:26And because he was dragged into this war with Israel, effectively he was put on the escalator. And he can't get off that escalator now. He needs to jump off to make a huge mea culpa. I'm sure he's capable of putting on a show like, you know, a Roman emperor who has really, you know, he receives the news from what is now Germany that his legions have been completely decimated by the Goths. So he declares victory and holds a triumph in Rome. He can do that. But that is not going to work, at least in the medium term. He's going to be stigmatized if he does. If he doesn't do that and he stays on the escalation escalator, then he's going down the way that George W.

26:21Bush has become synonymous with a major debacle. But what's to worry about, Yanis? I mean, America's a net exporter of energy. I mean, you know, Chevron's happy, right? But it's not a communist country. because if it was a communist country and a net exporter and every citizen was a shareholder in USA Inc, right? Of course. But, you know, if you're a blue-collar worker, you don't get any of the dividends of Chevron and ExxonMobil, do you? No.

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28:29Are European nations complicit in this war? Oh, absolutely. How? Well? Rammstein. Akrotiri. These are bases in Cyprus. Appallingly, it is British sovereign territory. Rammstein is a German base. Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany, can kick and scream that he doesn't agree with this war. Keir Starmer can say he doesn't agree with his war. Well, if you don't agree with his war, I mean, would you let Iran use your soil to wage war against somebody else? You wouldn't. Why would you let the United States wage a war which you think is detrimental to the interests of your country and of the West and of humanity?

29:13Only because you simply don't exist. You are a figment of our imagination. Starmer, you know, is a prime minister that could simply not be there. There could be some chosen representative of Donald Trump in 10 Downing Street. He wouldn't be doing anything different. I mean, maybe he kicks and screams for, what, five minutes? And then does he chuck a huey, as the Australians say? You know, does he do that? Yeah. Yeah, the vizier recalled to the imperial court and a new emissary dispatched to the outpost of empire. I guess to represent the government's position on this, they would counter and say, we have only permitted the use of these bases for defensive operations.

29:59I might take from your remark. So when bombers leave the British base of Akrotiri and they go over Iran and they kill children, that's defensive. Okay. Then, of course, George Orwell is having a field day. Quite. I think that's a double speak. Quite. You've also described Greece as Israel's satellite. And you've spoken a little bit as well about the military assets that Greece has deployed as relates to Cyprus. Tell me more about what you meant by that when you said Israel's satellite. Well, the beauty of these long-form discussions is that I can give you the chapter and verse on this. Absolutely.

30:38It was around 1999, 2000, when somebody in the Greek foreign ministry, somebody who was a friend of mine, Nikos Kotsias, who was an advisor to the then foreign minister of Greece, Joseph Opandreo, who later became prime minister, proposed a new dogma, a new strategy for Greece. And that was based on the idea of a strategic alliance between Greece and Israel, on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Given that we have had decades of tensions between Greece and Turkey, The idea is that Greece was never strong enough to counter Turkey, but Israel that is at odds with Turkey could become our strategic ally.

31:26And that was adopted in the early 2000s by George Papandreou, the social democrat. Then it was taken over by the right wing government, the Tories of Greece. And interestingly, this continued for the six months I was in government. that was not our policy, but six hours after my resignation on the 6th of July of 2015, maybe it's a coincidence. I don't think so. The prime minister with whom I had just fallen out gave the green light to Nikos Khodiaz, that gentleman who was at that time foreign minister to fly to Tel Aviv and sign the deal, which actually is quite a colonial one. It gives the right to the Israeli defense forces and air force to use Greek airspace and Greek territory for practicing war games without even the consent of the Greek government.

32:23That's becoming a satellite of another country. And since then, this current center-right, ultra-right, it's a combination. Think of it, imagine in Britain if you had an alliance between the Tories and Farage. That kind of government is the one we have in Greece. They have totally immersed themselves in ultra-Zionism. They become Netanyahu's, not so much ally, but handmaiden. And they have sold out most of the Greek defense industry to Israeli companies. Our prime minister has been called red-handed, spying on his own ministers using Israeli tech algorithms and spying surveillance methods. And now that the United States and Israel are bombarding Iran into smithereens, he, the prime minister of Greece, is getting a boost in the polls because he's playing the nationalist card.

33:29How? Our audience may have heard of or remember that in 1974, the Turkish army invaded Cyprus and took over the northern part. It doesn't matter why and how, but this was a major defeat for Greece and the Greek Cypriots. and since then Cyprus has been, the north part has been occupied by the Turkish army and Greece has effectively fallen behind this strategic game with Turkey. For the first time a Greek frigate is now off the coast of Cyprus with F-16, four F-16 Greek air force planes stationed on the island supposedly to defend Cyprus from Iran. There was one drone that the Iranians sent to bombard the Akrotiri base.

34:20Now, by the way, the Akrotiri base, I have to make this point again. I made it before. I'll repeat it. It's British sovereign territory. So essentially, the Greek navy and Greek air force are there to defend British sovereign territory, essentially to defend the right of the Americans to use part of Cyprus to bombard Iran on behalf of Israel. And that is being presented in this as a great victory against Turkey, which is absolutely astonishingly, you know, I would say irrational, but it is not because I think that, you know, the Greek premise understands very well. But what he's doing is he's playing to the nationalist Greek audience saying, look, we now are pushing back Turkey.

35:01What do they have in their minds that we're going to take over, we Greeks, the northern part of Cyprus with our frigate? Are we going to start another war with Turkey? Is this the way forward? Because, you see, the division of Cyprus between the Greek and the Turkish part is a tragedy. Effectively, we have a Berlin Wall going through not only Nicosia, but the whole of the island. I mean, the rational way forward would be to reunify the island on the basis of a bicommunal peace deal, whereby the Cypriots can look after Cyprus and they can become sovereign again with Greece and Turkey and Britain getting out of there.

35:41That would be the rational thing, what it would be in the interest, in our national interest, in Turkey's national interest. Instead, what I fear the most is that the war in Iran is being used by the Greeks in order to increase tensions with Turkey, something which is not necessarily inimical to the interests of President Erdogan of Turkey, who loves these tensions because it allows him to solidify his rule within Turkey, because this is how nationalists work. You know, they turn the population against the foreigners. They build up weaponry. They introduce new austerity because the money that is being spent on weapons is not being spent on hospitals.

36:20And then everybody's worse off except the powers that be that solidify their illegitimate power. And the defense companies, Yanis, you're talking about quite novel ideas like national sovereignty. People might feel a little bit challenged by some of the things that you're saying. In that context then, about nationalism, could you project, forecast a little bit the sort of medium term consequences, particularly for Keir Starmer and his unwillingness to confront Trump over this issue? In the British domestic press, listeners will know, the adults in the room, the sensibles, are sort of praising this as an instance of Britain expressing its sovereign interest, standing up to the Americans, not permitting them to use British bases for offensive operations as they see it.

37:09you don't see it that way. So what are the medium term consequences of that decision in his inability or his lack thereof to properly confront Donald Trump over this issue? Well, the moment you use Orwellian doublespeak in order to make it impossible for the polity to have a decent conversation, the conversation should be, why are we continuing to do as the Americans are demanding, not the Americans, the American administration, the White House is demanding when it is not in the interest of Britain. Instead, it is, we have a fake discussion as to, you know, did Kirsten Backel or did he not buckle?

37:51It's clear he buckled. Okay. Now, you can baptize, as we say in Greece, meat into fish so that you can pretend to be fasting when you're not. This is what's happening here. But this is simply depleting the capacity of British society to have a decent conversation about what its real interests are. For instance, are the interests of the United Kingdom served by being part of NATO and expanding NATO's territory into the East, into Georgia, into Ukraine? Is this enhancing the capacity of British society to reproduce itself viably? Now, this discussion is not taking place. It is taken for granted.

38:38The warmongering, the fake invocation of military Keynesianism. So, you know, in Europe, not just in Britain, but in the European Union and the United Kingdom, over the last 20 years, especially after the great financial crisis of 2008, it's very clear that what we're lacking across Europe, UK, EU, is a growth model. We don't have an answer to the question, where is the investment going to come from in order to produce the things that will determine the future, like green energy, like AI. The Chinese have the answer. In Europe and in the UK, we talk about it and we do nothing about it. And the only show in town is military engineers.

39:23They're talking about investing in the technologies of the defense industry. But they're not even doing that. They are talking about that. If you look at Keir Starmer's policy, they're taking a few measly millions away from foreign aid, which is a crime against logic because there, even one pound can make a difference to somebody's life. And they're throwing it at British Aerospace. They're throwing it at Airbus. They're throwing it at Leonardo in Europe and so on, which is a bottomless pit. But, you know, unless you do that which the Americans are doing, which is to borrow trillions and throw it at the military industrial complex, this is not going to be a growth machine in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

40:10So essentially, this debate, the way it is unfolding in Britain and in the European Union is doing no good. And it is depleting our capacity to have a proper conversation about what needs to be done. what you've just spoken about there do you connect that to Labour's loss of left-wing support in the UK do you think the two facts are related do you think something else is going on there well I would be astonished I'm still astonished that there are you know some colleagues of mine friends of mine like Clive Lewis like John McDonnell who are still in the Labour Party I mean this Labour Party is utterly toxic to anyone who has basic ethical standards, not just left-wing people.

40:59I mean, you know, can you get more right-wing than Tony Blair? No, but Tony Blair never expelled Tony Benn. He never expelled Ken Loach from the Labour Party. This gentleman, Keir Starmer, the audacity to get rid of every left-winger that speaks out for traditional, you know, progressive values, to get rid of Ken Loach, as in the anti-Semite because he doesn't support the genocide of Palestinians. You know, it is absolutely preposterous. At that point, it is the Labour Party that chose not to have access to, you know, leftist support. It's not the other way around. It's not that leftists decided not to support Kier Starmer.

41:45Kier Starmer simply took exit stage left or right, I should say. I mean, I should tell listeners we're speaking. It's the day after your birthday, which you celebrated with 2 ,000 other people, including Zach Polanski, Jeremy Corbyn, Grace Blakely, all on a stage in London last night. Obviously, the Green Party surging popularity, both in terms of its membership and electorally. Talk to me about how you understand that growth in popularity. Is it only possible because of those stances that the Labour Party has taken? Is it in part contributed to, but there's a lot more going on there? Talk to me about that.

42:28What's your understanding? Well, after the great financial collapse led to the Osborne-Camero policy of socialism for the bankers and austerity, harsh austerity for everybody else, you had in this country a massive wave of discontent. Now, whenever that happens, whether this is after 1929 in continental Europe or after 2008 in Britain or in Europe, this discontent needs to find some expression. We saw this in 2015-2016. It partly found expression through Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, Momentum, and so on. and where the left fails to inspire people with a positive agenda, the ultra-right comes in with a destructive, toxic, negative agenda.

43:29We saw this in the Brexit referendum, the right-wing fascistic Brexit project, which in the end won. And it won because in the end the Labour Party can always be counted upon, or at least the deep Labour Party, the deep bench of the Conservative Labour Party, to essentially pull the plug of any progressive project. Because in the end, in the same way that the Democrats preferred Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, hoping that they would make a comeback with somebody like Biden or Kamala Harris, Similarly, the deep bench of the Tories within the Labour Party preferred Boris Johnson to Jeremy Corbyn.

44:15And once Jeremy's base was disillusioned, you had the burgeoning of the rightist movement, of the manosphere of the Tommy Robinson supporters of reform, but you still had a leaderless movement that needed to move in the progressive direction. And that's where Zach Polanski, by rebranding the Greens as an eco-socialist party, created a bridge of hope between those who want a radical transformation of society so as to change the distribution of income, to have a wealth tax. I think it was very smart on Zach's part to move in, not just talk about the environment, but also on wealth and the distribution of wealth and wealth taxes and bring this together with the idea that the model of growth under capitalism, especially in the last few decades, is ecocidal.

45:23It is depleting the, it is making it impossible for humanity to acquiesce in its own survival. And so I think that, you know, Zach has been a breath of fresh air, as I keep saying. But I still, you know, the reason why we connived, and I use this verb in the full knowledge of what it means, to bring Zach and Jeremy yesterday on the stage together and have them applaud one another, is because, I'll speak personally here, I truly believe that these trends of the progressive movement need to work together. Let's stop being stupid folks, because the left has been, you know, remember the opening scenes in the life of Brian.

46:06We have to overcome that. I think we do. I mean, okay, you explicitly drew a parallel to 1929, and that same context goes in a different direction. We've had a lot of debate on this podcast. it's happening at a national level in Britain as well, about actually whether or not we even have the right vocabulary to describe this moment. Because everybody reaches for fascism to talk about the alternate side of that radical agenda, the radical proposals to change what is happening. Whether it's Farage, whether it's Trump, there are key differences. Whether it's

46:43demography, significant young male population, recently demobbed with military training. There are parallels, perhaps, if you were to look at the technological arena and the sort of the closeness of, I mentioned the key part of the MAGA coalition earlier, technological advances that are tied to the Trump movement. I think I've seen you use the term proto-fascism to talk about what's happening now. Is Nigel Farage a fascist? Why do you draw that distinction? Why do you use the word proto? Talk to me about that. I've graduated fascism now because events are cataclysmic the last two, three, five, six months look, I'm not going to call Farage a fascist or Trump a fascist but I'm going to say that that movement is a fascist movement without branding people and the reason I do this is this I've studied fascism as part of my academic career and I wrote books about the manner in which fascism rose up in the 1920s and 1930s.

47:47And I'm going to say this totally.

47:51The fundamental process by which fascists gain power and we lose our countries to fascism are very distinct and now they're being replicated. The first thing that happens is there's some collapse of the banking system. like in 1929 like 2008 that leads to a great depression, great recession let's call it whatever it is, you know, deflationary process unemployment discontent socialism for the very few for big business by the liberal establishment bailouts, call it whatever you want and harsh austerity for the many that creates discontent, as I was saying before and very soon after that once the left fails and the left is always responsible through its failures to capture the imagination of people once the left fails one way or the other either by not getting into government or getting into government as we did in Greece and then betraying the cause and doing a flip-flop so the left fails and then what happens is some very smart populists, rightist fascistic populists what they do is they copy, plagiarize the language of the left when it comes to criticizing banks, big business, and chronic capitalism.

49:11So if you look at the speeches of, you know, somebody like Hitler himself, or Goebbels, actually. Goebbels is a better example. He was a smart man compared to Hitler. Much smarter. The first page of every speech that I've read by Goebbels, I could have written it. It's just a left-wing critique of chronic capitalism, of financiers, financialization, and so on. And then, okay, so that's the first thing they do. The second thing they do is they present themselves as more neoliberal than Thatcher, while critiquing chronic capitalism. You know, the market, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the brewer.

49:53They're being smashed. The state, you know, the state is presented as a communist state. You know, the liberal establishment is presented as communist. a uni party it doesn't matter whether you've got the Tories or Labour it's the same party so that's the next step very soon after that they start evoking a fictitious golden past a golden era age that they promise to bring back and to look after the poor to look after the needy to double or treble minimum wages double or treble minimum pensions right something neoliberals wouldn't do and sometimes when they get into power like Viktor Orbán in Hungary they do it like Mussolini introduced pensions in the 1920s the first pension system in Europe was Mussolini's fascist pension but there is a social contract there we will look after the poor but forget about having a voice trade unions elections or you know elections as long as you vote for us but you can't vote for anybody else really the attack on public servants, the attack on the BBC, the attack on all these institutions which are being presented as communist.

51:07You know, the social democrats are presented as communist, even though people like Tony Blair have done everything in order to get rid of anyone who was Marxist. And then at some point, more recently, in order to distance themselves from their anti-Semitic passed from the Holocaust, they bathe themselves into, you know, ultra Zionism. So, you know, instead of attacking the Jew, they're attacking the Muslim, the left hooker. It doesn't matter, you know, the trans. So, and why did I stop talking about proto-fascism and start talking about fascism? Because what I was saying when I was using the term proto-fascism is that for fascism to become full-blooded fascism, They have to be in alliance with big business.

51:55And up until two, three years ago, they went. But now you see that they are in the United States, reform here. There are now large chunks of big capital that are now banking, like they did in the 1920s, the 30s. I think it was a switch, you know, a lever against the left, against the communists. They backed the fascists on the basis that they can control them and use them in order to maintain control for themselves. That's what big business stupidly thinks or not so stupidly. And you can see this with the tech oligarchs. And finally, when you have them in power, immediately what they do is they betray their own base.

52:37The blue-collar workers, the proletariat that they promise to look after. They get into power and look at the big, beautiful bill by Trump. If Farage gets into 10 Downing Street, the first thing he's going to do is he's going to go into bed, proverbially, with a big business. And he's going to wreck what is left of the British working class. There's no doubt about that. So to the extent that this is my understanding of how fascism wins power, now we are in the clasps of fascism. We're running out of time, Janice. I did want to talk more to you about economics, but you mentioned deflationary crises there.

53:16The spectre of this war in Iran is that we may well end up with stagflation. Indeed, the response of the central banks may well be to increase rates as a result of that. Talk to me about how you understand the likely economic fallout of the war and how financial institutions might respond and whether or not they should respond in that way. And many commentators are hoping that this war is going to prove as insignificant in the medium term as the Liberation Day tariffs by Trump. Because remember when he introduced these huge tariffs, the liberal establishment was screaming blue murder, feeling that it would be recessionary, it would be inflationary, it would be all those things that's stagnation with the results.

54:09And it didn't happen. So they are now hoping that, you know, if the war in Iran stops soon enough, then again, in a few months time, we will have forgotten about it. But this time they are very wrong. And the reason is, there are multiple reasons. The first one is that tariffs didn't affect the working class as much because the commodities that the working class buys, basic goods, are rather elastic in terms of their demand. So a lot of those tariffs were absorbed by the oligopolistic vendors. The second main reason is that in the United States, at least, the recessionary effects of the tariffs were cancelled out by a wave of huge investment in AI.

54:51But AI is very energy intensive. Therefore, the AI splurge has also ended. That wave has subsided substantially because of fears that the energy, the electricity which is necessary to drive the AI machine is becoming too expensive. A third reason is that last year, interest rates went on their way down. Now they have stopped. And as you said, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Fed are thinking of hiking interest rates to counter what they see as an inflationary tendency. That would be a catastrophic error. Because when inflation is generated because of the rise in energy costs, there's nothing that interest rates can do to stop these costs from rising.

55:43All they can do is crush the economy, create a huge unemployment surge, and therefore to reduce inflation by means of this sledgehammer of a recession that is unnecessary. So I do hope that the Bank of England doesn't make the mistake of increasing interest rates. It will be gross negligence if they do. And I do hope that we understand that unless we find ways of shrinking the profit rates of big multinationals that are increasingly enjoying market power as a result of developments over the last few decades, then there's nothing we can do to contain inflation and prevent stagflation. There's also a pretty strong strain of argument here in the UK that one of the answers might be to open up licensing agreements for fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea, which to me seems slightly counterintuitive.

56:37First of all, it'll take 10 years to come online, but then also surely one of the lessons from being hurt by this rocketing and actually increasingly volatile oil price is that perhaps we should turn away from a dependency on those fossil fuels. Perhaps there might be answers in renewables elsewhere, but certainly there's a strain of thought too that's advocating for reopening the North Sea and I'm not sure that makes much sense. Well, it's the people who always wanted to destroy the planet faster in order to line up their pockets. Look, this is just pathetically stupid. Firstly, it takes 15 years for new developments to come online.

57:11Okay, so this is not a short-term fix for what is a short-term or medium-term problem. Secondly, what we need to seriously consider is the the very notion of an electricity market. Only there can be no such thing as an electricity market. I mean, in this studio, there's one way that comes out bringing electricity into this machinery all over us. You don't have 50 ones from different companies and allowing you to choose the cheapest and the best electricity, right? So essentially what you have is you have the state simulating a market, which is not a market, it is a cartel. And let me put it very simply.

57:53And suppose that, I mean, already in Britain, you have a very good record of almost 50 percent, some depends on the day, of your electricity being produced at zero marginal cost through renewables, mainly windmills, wind turbines. That, those kilowatt hours are produced at zero marginal cost and you're paying for them as if they've been produced by the most expensive fracked gas, natural gas from New Mexico or Texas. Now, that is mind-bogglingly ridiculous. I mean, of course, it isn't if you are the company that is selling this very cheap electricity at this exorbitant price. But from our perspective, you know, we have to reconsider what Thatcher did.

58:38She took a perfectly usable and serviceable public utility that had the opportunity to say something really very simple. What is the average cost of producing electricity? 10. Let's sell it for 11. Have a 10 % profit. Now you can't do that because you have a pseudo market, a quasi market, a phony state-created market that serves the interests of the cartel. It's time to blow up these phony markets and go back to a socialized electricity, power generation, and distribution system, which pushes more and more free green energy into the system and simultaneously reduces the average price. It wouldn't be happening here.

59:23Even if we went from 50 % to 98 % of all electricity being produced by windmills in Britain, you would still be paying for all of that electricity a price predicated on the cost of the 1-2 % that is produced by natural gas. That is madness. But of course, it's extremely lucrative. and you know it's a it's a great owner if you own that cartel madness for you and i but perhaps not for the people that own those companies um we've only got a few minutes left you know so i'll rattle through a few questions and i'll let you get on your way you mentioned uh earlier in the interview uh about you being banned from entering germany i wondered does that ban still stand have you been back to germany since that's happened yes i have and it's very interesting how it happened I was invited by the managing director of BMW to deliver a keynote speech at the BMW Foundation in Berlin while that ban was valid.

1:00:29So I thanked them very much for that. It was a great honor. But I reminded them that I'm not allowed to go into Germany. And they said, no, no, no, don't worry about that. Doesn't apply to us. No way. And I went. And the authorities didn't touch me. Since then, I have taken them to court, challenging their right not to tell me the rationale for banning me. And only, lo and behold, miraculously, that court case gets postponed every second month for the next two months. And it is not taking place. Another court date, you're facing drug charges in Greece for talking on a podcast like this one about taking a pill nearly 40 years ago.

1:01:17I don't want to get you into more trouble by asking you more questions about that. It's not trouble at all. But what is your, I mean, we have to keep it brief, so forgive me for asking this because it's a bigger question. But does the prosecution have a case? You know, what's your assessment of, is it politically motivated? It's not politically motivated, it's pathetic. I'm being tried I have a court date on the 16th of December which will be fun for propagating drug use because I said to a bunch of youngsters that yes I did take some ecstasy 57 years ago in Sydney at a party and it was great fun, I danced like crazy, then I gave me a huge migraine and I never took it again and then I went on to say to them that, you know, look, I cannot tell you what to do.

1:02:07The last thing youngsters need is a 65-year-old to tell them what to do. They will probably do the opposite. But, you know, mind addiction. Addiction is the great Satan. And for that, what is interesting, Alin, I think this is important, the sequence. The propaganda department of the right-wing party, they called the Truth Commission. I mean, they have a sense of humor, right? Or way in, which is, of course, exactly the opposite. what they do. They are all about distortion lies. It's a propaganda machine for the ruling party. They took out a bit where I said that it was fun and they blasted all over the social media.

1:02:48Two hours later, the Minister of Health and the Minister of the Police were on a panel on television demanding my prosecution. Politicians, these are two ultra-rightist, fascistic because, as I said, in Greece we have imagined a coalition of I wouldn't even say Farage, of the Tories and Tommy Robinson. So the prime minister, who is actually a neoliberal guy, and I think he's laughing at this court case. But this is how he has prevented a Faragist or Tommy Robinson-like party from stealing part of his clientele, voters. He has them in government, and he's given them the ministers that they need in order to conduct their culture wars, like the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Migration.

1:03:37Somebody who said that the only way to stop migration is to have blood in the Aegean is the Minister of Migration. So he lets them speak to their audience by saying, oh, look, we are giving a hard time to some left-winger like Varoufakis. So it really is very sad for the judiciary that they are being dragged through this mud by the ultra-right. and I'm going to refuse to answer questions about this. I'm simply going to defend the judiciary by saying that this is a court case that should never have landed in court and we'll see how that goes. I look forward to seeing how it goes indeed. Speaking of dancing all through the night, Yanis, did you know you're actually going viral in Russia recently?

1:04:22There's a song that features your name that's being played across Moscow's nightclubs. I found out. Have you seen the video? I have seen the video. I have no idea. We live in a world that makes increasingly less sense. In a world that makes increasingly less sense, Yeros Vanofakis, why should we choose the path of most resistance? Because it's fun. And, you know, life is not worthwhile if, you know, we simply follow the path of least resistance leading to the destruction of our soul. It's really not fun. Life should be fun. So resisting is existing. Janis Varoufakis, thank you so much for your time.

1:05:00I'm very grateful. You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman with me, Oli Dugmore, and Janis Varoufakis. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review. This episode was produced by Catherine Hughes. The Exchange will be back next Wednesday.

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