Yanis VaroufakisSpeech given by Prof. Dr. Yanis Varoufakis
at the International Munich Peace Conference on February 17, 2024

“Towards a non-aligned and peaceful world”

Please find the transcription for print HERE

Introduction by Maria R. Feckl
Welcome, Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. You are a Greek economist, author, and politician.
From January to July 2015, you were the Greek Finance Minister and led the negotiations with Greece’s creditors to lead the country out of the crisis. After the referendum to reject the austerity dictate was not held, you resigned.
You co-founded DiEM25 in 2016. You are also General Secretary of MeRA25, the party of DiEM25 in Greece.
Your theme today is “Towards a non-aligned and peaceful world”.
Allow me to say a few words about the Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM for short. Non-aligned movement is the term for states that have joined neither the (capitalist) West nor the (communist) Eastern bloc after the dissolution of the colonial empires. They supported each other in the goals of self-determination, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism.
The organization condemned the formation of blocs during the East-West conflict because of the danger of a Third World War and advocated peaceful coexistence and disarmament. It was constituted at its first meeting in Belgrade in 1961.
Today, over 100 countries belong to the Non-Aligned Movement. They represent 55 percent of the world’s population. It is the second largest group of states after the United Nations. They hold almost two-thirds of the seats in the UN General Assembly.
The 19th summit of the Non-Aligned movement or Non-Aligned States took place this year from January 15-20 in Kampala, Uganda. Have you, dear listeners, heard about this? At least not me. It’s good that we have Professor Yanis Varoufakis with us today. The floor is yours. We look forward to your presentation.

Speech by Professor Yanis Varoufakis
Good evening. Thank you for the introduction and your presence. On a personal note, it’s always wonderful to come back to the University of Munich. The first time I was here was in the School of Economics in 1987. I was giving a very different kind of talk but 1987 was a period of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. A period of hope here in Germany. The Berlin Wall was about to fall, and we all hoped whether we were on the left or on the right a new era would start, an era where the ticking clock towards nuclear Armageddon or our species’ extinction would be stopped. And then we could have a nice little discussion between us as to what kind of world of peace and what kind of peace we wanted to build.

The US Dollar, Breton Woods, and the Marshall Plan
As we speak today, we have a new Cold War which just like the old Cold War flares up into hideous Carnage whether this is in the fields of Ukraine or the land of Israel Palestine, Yemen or Kashmir for that matter or various other parts of the world where the Cold War between the superpowers erupted into blood and death. The Cold War gave rise, as we heard, to the non-aligned movement. My movement DIEM25 and MERA25 position on this evolved over the last few years as a rationale for going back to the idea of a non-aligned movement while avoiding the serious mistakes of that old nonaligned movement.
A few words on my understanding of the new Cold War as I see it today. Allow me to start with – well I’m an economist I can’t help it so I’m going to start with – money. In particular, I’m going to start with a remarkable currency in the history of humanity. It’s called the US dollar. You see something remarkable happened in 1971 that changed the world and is determining our future today. The dollar became the first currency in the history of the world that was issued by a hegemonic powerful country, the United States of America. It was becoming increasingly hegemonic, increasingly dominant as a result of something, that German intellectuals find very hard to understand, as a result of the deficit in the current account of that country and in the government budget.
You see from the Roman Empire onwards when a large powerful State Empire went into the red, and started being in debt, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, they went from losing to red. Not so the United States. The United States of America grew in power in proportion to the quantity of red ink that was dripping from its budget. That’s strange. How did that happen? It’s a very long story but I’ll cut it short.
The German industrial Miracle of the 1950s 60s 70s and so on – which is today in serious trouble – the European Union, our idea of progress, prosperity with low inflation, and low unemployment, all these are the products of the system of Breton Woods that was instituted by the United States. It began with the Breton Woods conference in 1944. And then you remember the Deutsch Mark had a fixed exchange rate with the dollar, with the French franc with the Greek drachma for that matter for years. I mean I grew up and I remember it was 30 drachmas to a dollar every year of my life until I was 15 years of age. Right similarly the Deutsch Mark was fixed. That was an American design. The basic idea was – that after 1945 you know your country, my country was in ashes, in ruins. The only creditor country was the United States. The only industrial power with functioning factories was the United States. They had a surplus and their great concern was how would they manage to sell their Industrial Products like washing machines and cars and so on after converting their armaments industry into civilian goods, from tanks to cars, from bullets to washing machines.
The Americans could produce so much in 1945 so that the American economy could not absorb all the washing machines and cars they could produce. So, they wanted us Europeans to buy them. That makes perfect sense, but we didn’t have any money. So, they gave us money. It’s called the Marshall Plan and not just the Marshall Plan but huge quantities of loans that were coming to this country, to France, to Greece, to Britain. So, what was happening? This Breton Woods was created as a single currency union, a monetary union. I mean we didn’t have the same currency, but we had fixed exchange rates – same thing.
And how was this maintained? We all had the dollar. It was the dollar zone. It was maintained because the Americans every time they sold a jet to Lanser or a Cadillac
to some French person, the dollars, that they had sent to us were going back. They were being repatriated to the United States. As long as they had a surplus, they could give us dollars and then they would take them back with everything we bought from them. It was a recycling mechanism of dollars. But the moment they stopped having a surplus they went into a deficit from 1967 onwards. That system was doomed to fail.
And the Americans are very different from the Europeans here in Europe. Our system may be breaking down, but we keep trying to maintain it. Americans when their system breaks down, go and destroy it. And they created something else, so they created the period of financialization after 1971. How did they do that? They threw Europe out of the dollar zone. We had our exit. You and we all the Europeans were thrown out of the dollar zone and then we had the fluctuations. And then we Europeans started thinking of creating our own common currency which became eventually the Euro. But the whole period after 1971 is a period during which – and this is what explains how the United States became so dominant while being in deficit and more – the more deficit they had, the more dominant they became. The dollar became just a piece of paper where the Americans wrote a number. Done. And said this is the value. Now that sounds like a fake currency. It’s not because think about today and this is going to bring me to the new Cold War.
Repatriating US Dollars
Today if you are Mercedes-Benz or BMW here in Bavaria or if you are a Chinese aluminum producer in Shanghai: who will you sell your exports to? Will you get most of your demand from the United States of America? They will pay you in dollars using their deficit, using the fact that we want dollars even if we don’t want anything to buy from the Americans because this is the only currency in the history of humanity that people want even if they don’t want to buy anything from the country that produces it. Why? Because if you want to buy aluminum from the Chinese you have to pay them in dollars. So, you must take Euros, and exchange them for dollars to buy Chinese aluminum. If you want to buy oil from Nigeria from a French company – no American is involved – you need dollars because this is the currency in which Nigerian oil is sold. So, we want dollars right and so they give us the dollars for our commodities for
the exports of the German to Japan. What do the Chinese capitalist and the German capitalist do when he – I was about to say or ‘she’ but it’s usually ‘he’ unfortunately – what do they do with the money the dollars they get? They take it back to Wall Street. And what do they do with it there? They buy land in Miami or California. Or they buy
shares in American companies or they buy American debt bonds. So effectively the German capitalist, the Chinese capitalist, and the Japanese capitalist finance the deficit of the United States. This is how the deficits grow and the power of the United States grows.
New Cold War
I’m coming now to the new Cold War. I don’t know about you but when a certain Mr. Donald Trump – remember him? Unfortunately, you will be remembering him very soon again as it seems, I hope not, but it’s very likely – Donald Trump made a decision that the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine dismissed as the move of a madman. He banned the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, you remember, in 2016. And then he banned another Chinese Communication Company ZTE. And then he slapped 25% tariff on Chinese aluminum. This was his trade war against China. Then I started wondering why is he doing that? The answer that he’s a madman was not an answer that satisfied me because even though he is a very poor excuse for human nature, a Madman he’s not.
China and Taiwan
The answer that his people gave me when I asked them and the answer that they gave in public was, because China wants Taiwan. I thought “What?” China has wanted Taiwan since 1949 this is not news. Why did you let China into the World Trade Organization? Why did you let Apple go to Shenzhen and build the iPhones there? Taiwan cannot be the answer. It’s a constant that has not changed. It’s a ridiculous answer.
Then they said “Oh, but you know the Chinese have been spying on us Americans. What? The Americans who are spying on Angela Merkel are telling us that the
problem with the Chinese is that they are trying to spy on them. It was a question that I didn’t have an answer to then.
Joe Biden
Biden comes in who is supposed to be the anti-trump, the man who comes in to undo all the damage that Trump had done. What does he do with the Cold War, the new Cold War, the trade war with China? He turbocharges it. He makes it worse or more intense. He issues an order banning the sale of all high-tech microchips to China. This is like issuing a statement that we the United States of America are going to prevent China from becoming an advanced technologically advanced society. That’s a declaration of economic war on China. Okay, Trump had not gone as far as Biden did. Why he’s not a madman either?
Geostrategic insignificance of Europe
I have an answer for you which also explains the complete geostrategic insignificance of Europe, of all of us, German, Greeks, French. We are irrelevant. Geostrategically. The answer is that we have a new form of capital.
What’s capital?
I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about machines. I’m talking about produced means of production, like you know a fishing rod that you use to fish. It is a piece of capital because you produced it to produce something else, the fish. A tractor is a capital because you have it – you don’t take it to go running around – in order to produce something else. It’s a produced means of production. An industrial robot, all singing, all dancing very modern one: it’s a produced means of production.
New Form of Capital
The algorithms, the data centers, the huge server farms in between Washington State and Utah and elsewhere, the optic fiber cables. This is all capital, but it is not meant to produce stuff. It is a produced means of manipulating our behavior. That
has never happened before. Humans always wanted to manipulate the behavior of other humans whether they were preachers, philosophers – we in the school of philosophy – you know actors, playwriters, poets, politicians – they always wanted and still want to modify people’s behavior. But now for the first time, we have machines that do it. And they do it dialectically as Hegel would have said: we train them to train us, to train them, to train us, to train them, to train us, to train them, to give us desires which then they satisfy directly by selling that stuff to us by passing every market, every capitalist market.
Cloud Capital in Techno-Feudalism
That’s not capitalism anymore. We have a new form of capital. I call it Cloud Capital in my latest book. And anyone who owns that Capital has the capacity to own 40% of the world income as we speak. Do you know 40% of the world income is going to the owners of this Cloud Capital every time you buy something out of amazon.com? 40% of what you pay goes to Jeff Bezos. And he doesn’t do anything. He just has the capital which modifies your behavior and turns the capitalists into vessels as in feudalism. That’s why I call the system we live in Techno-Feudalism.
Now why am I telling you this? Now as a prelude to concluding regarding the need for non-alignment. Because there are only two sources, and locations of Cloud Capital: the United States of America and China. Why do you think the German car industry is kaput? Why? You produce lots of cars: Volkswagen produces lots of electric cars, and so does BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. Well. I’ll tell you what, compare them with the Tesla, Elon Musk’s Tesla and BYD, the Chinese Tesla, which is going to become bigger than Tesla very soon. When you buy a Volkswagen, Volkswagen gets 50,000 €- end of story – that’s it. And then maybe some money every now and then for servicing the car. But Volkswagen doesn’t get any more of that. Most of that money doesn’t go to Volkswagen because Volkswagen does not have the Battery Technology. Because for 15 years Germany has not even been investing in battery technologies they have to import the Battery Technology from elsewhere. So very low value is added. One payment. Forget it. Nothing more than that. Do you know what Elon Musk gets? By the way, did you know that a Tesla or a BVD you buy has a button, a Tesla brand new you’re driving around you feel really good about yourself?
You know that Elon Musk has a button he can press, and your car doesn’t move. Do you know that? Go and check it! He can stop it. It’s like a phone. If Apple wants to stop your iPhone from working, it can stop your iPhone from working with one command from the satellite, from the cell tower. You know that in the United States as we speak here, too, if you buy a secondhand Tesla and you do not register
it with a Tesla dealership then they stop updating it and then after a while, it doesn’t go. Do you know that as you are driving around Tesla knows what music you’re listening to, what mood you are in, where you’re going, why you’re going, what you have bought, and to which shops you went with the car? And this is all data that Elon Musk sells to amazon.com in real Time. That’s the power of Cloud Capital. The Chinese have it. The Americans have it. The Germans don’t have it. Europe, we don’t have that.
Who represents Europe?
Have you wondered who, if there is tomorrow going to be and I hope there is going to be a peace conference to resolve, to end the war, the bloody war in Ukraine – who is going to represent Europe? We know who is going to represent Ukraine – Selenskyj, Russia – Putin, America. Who’s going to represent us? Not Scholz: he will be blocked by the Fins and by the Estonians who think that Olaf Scholz is too close to Putin. They won’t let Emanuel Macron, because they think Emanuel Macron is too close to Putin. So, the Germans and the French will have to pay for Ukraine, but the German and the French people will not be represented around that table. This is the state in which Europe is today.
Never-ending Wars in Ukraine and Gaza
And instead, we have Putin who wants nothing more than for that war to continue forever and ever, an endless war. Because the moment it ends his own authority is going to be destabilized. The same with Selenskyj, the moment the war ends, Selenskyj is finished. The same with Biden. Biden needs this endless war because he needs to have a bulwark against Trump. And he needs the new Mexican and Texan oil and gas fracking producers to keep selling us hugely expensive natural gas here in Germany without a resolution of any kind of dispute in the eastern part of Europe. So, you see they need one another, similar take. Netanyahu: what is Netanyahu’s greatest nightmare? Peace. If peace breaks out in Israel he’s finished.
He has no reason to exist. He will be overthrown. He’ll probably end up in jail by his own people. Right, so we have never-ending wars. Never-ending wars are being propelled by the people in power. NATO is a bit like the mafia it creates the threat and the insecurity which allows it to sell to us security and protection.
I asked once a fellow academic who used to be the chief of staff of NATO and before that he was the NSA deputy director appointed by George W. Bush, not some left-wing. And I said to him Bob, why do we need NATO these days? This was in 2012. Why do we need NATO these days? And the answer was, we need (meaning the United States as an American) – that was in Texas where I used to teach then – and he said: “Yanis, don’t you know why? We need to keep Germany down, us in Europe, and the Russians on edge. That’s a point of NATO to create insecurity to then sell us security. So, Putin wants an endless war. NATO wants an endless war. What are we going to do? Well, we need European sovereignty. We need non-alignment. We need to say neither Putin nor NATO.
The Need for European Sovereignty
In the same way back in 2003 when – I think that was a very courageous decision by the German government – Schröder decided not to play any role in the invasion of Iraq. Schröder was not a friend of Saddam Hussein, but he understood that the invasion of Iraq would bring about ISIS. It would bring about an escalation of misanthropy. One million people dead. Right similar to us today. We can see that the clouds of the new Cold War are thickening and darkening between the Cloud Capital of the United States and the Cloud Capital of China. It is really very easy for a spark to ignite a major catastrophe.
Climate Catastrophe
We can see that climate catastrophe is coming because those two bits of Cloud Capital are not allowing the people of the United States and the people of China and the people of Europe to converge in order to have a discussion about how we’re going to end the climate emergency. Instead, what are we doing? We are having COP28 in the United Arab Emirates and we appoint the head of an oil company to lead the fight against climate change.
This is the degree of our stupidity. We Europeans are the stupid continent. We are rich. We have the fantastic tradition of these universities. We have intelligence. We have a history of philosophy, of science, of expertise. We are the richest continent in the world and we play no role whatsoever. We let Washington and Mr. Stoltenberg.
Who is Mr. Stoltenberg to tell us that we need a never-ending war?
That’s why we are conversing for non-alignment. But a new kind of non-alignment. Not the old one I mentioned. And this is how I end, that we must not repeat the mistakes of the non-alignment movement. Because the non-aligned movement back then, you mentioned, and the conference. The mistake was to think that if the third world gets together – it was called the third world, now it’s called the global South, we are full of euphemisms – if the developing world, the global South gets together and that will be a bulwark against the bad people in the North. In the global North that’s not so there are truly nasty people. In the global South there are truly nasty people. This whole thing about the BRICS. The BRICS are the great force that will clash with NATO and the United States. The Saudi Arabians want to go into the BRICS. There’s nothing. There’s no more violent regime, murderous regime, misogynic regime than that. They’re not our friends.
New non-aligned movement as a Grassroots movement
The new non-aligned movement must be a Grassroots movement, not a governmental movement. And it must involve the people in Germany, the people in Nigeria, the people in South Africa, the people in China, and the people in the United States of America, most of whom have been very hard done by globalization. And it is their despair and their deaths that are feeding the beast of fascism through Trump. So, let’s start, we have a lot of work to do.
Thank you.

First question (Kurdish Perspective):
With regard to the Kurdish perspective. As a Kurdish feminist, I would be interested in hearing what you think about the struggles or the wars and the genocide that is
taking place in the Near East. And we as the Kurdish people suffered under these wars for a long time already. Well, of course, I think the solution is not to be found in nation-states. If you are somewhat involved in the Kurdish perspective and their problems, we also have perspectives about life and dignity and so on. I would like to know about your approach towards the Kurdish question.

Yanis Varoufakis (Kurdish Perspective):
Your question in three words: woman, life, freedom.
And now a few more words on the same subject. Was it not horrendous how the West treated the Peshmerga, the great Kurdish fighters, who bore the brunt of the war against ISIS? Even the United States who had declared the Kurdish fighters to be a terrorist organization had an alliance with them because they needed them. And after the Kurds – and remember those women who fought, the women fighters of the Peshmerga – after they defeated ISIS what does the United States and Europe do? Drop the Kurdish cause like a hot brick! So, solidarity with our Kurdish comrades especially the women. Because to be a woman who bears arms against Islamic fundamentalists in the mountains of Iraq, in the mountains of Syria – that is bravery beyond the comprehension of the European mind. So, solidarity.
One important point though that I want to share with you. I want to share with you a dilemma I have, an ambiguity that I have in me. You know when the woman, life, freedom demonstrations in Iran started. Together with comrades of mine and with our Iranian comrades we tried to support the demonstrators and we still do to the greatest possible degree. At the same time, I have to tell you that I do not want to see the United States Security forces, military forces, and Pentagon planners succeed in overthrowing the regime, the awful regime in Iran, the patriarchal misogynist regime, and Theocratic regime and to install another ‘sheikh puppet government’ serving the interests of the United States. So, I’m caught up in this dilemma and I’m confessing this to you, I do not want the Iranian government to lose and to be overthrown by what NATO wants to impose there. And I want to oppose them at the very same time supporting the demonstrators on the streets. Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you.

Second Question (Ukraine):
As we are with the peace movement today, I want to pose a very basic question: what do you think about the idea with regard to Ukraine, to surrender cities without a fight and showing the white flag?

Yanis Varoufakis (Ukraine)
Thank you for posing this question. The day that Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine I came out with an article. This was the best I could do, put something on my site, an article, and the title was “We must all stand with Ukraine against the criminal invasion of Vladimir Putin”. I happen to think personally that Vladimir Putin is a criminal and I thought that at some personal cost in 2001 when I was speaking as an academic, not as a politician like now. Back then I was very far away from being anything like a politician. I was a member of the Senate of the University of Athens. And I remember one day at the Senate meeting, the Greek government back then, the government of Alexis Tsipras, Social Democratic had sent a request, which was more like an order, to the Senate of the University of Athens, that we award an honorary doctorate to a certain Mr. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. Back then Putin was the favorite son of the West in Russia. At the time they did their utmost to support that criminal. I stood up in the Senate and I said: “This man has killed 250,000 people in Chechnya 250,000 people, erased Chechnya completely based on an Islamophobic narrative in order to solidify his own presidency in the Kremlin. And you want us to give him an honorary doctorate?” I was a minority of one, everybody has voted in favor.
I remember six months later; I was in London with a friend of mine. You may have heard of him, a politician called Jeremy Corbin. We were together outside the Russian Embassy in London demonstrating against Putin and we were being portrayed by the establishment, by the liberal establishment as eccentrics and extremists. So, my position on Putin could not be clearer than it is correct.
However, at the very same time looking at the facts on the ground looking at what was going on within Ukraine. Our movement DieM25 immediately tried to know, tried to think hard on what the best course of action was then, given that Putin’s troops were attacking the Donbas. They were attacking Kiew. And our suggestion was because I believe you must always not just say “no”, to whatever is happening, but you must have alternatives to what would you have done differently. We said that the only solution that we can see which is consistent with Ukrainian independence and
sovereignty and the interest of the Ukrainian people and the Russian people and Europeans and the global South because of the famine that was boosted as a result of the magnificent rise in the price of fertilizers of food and so on was to kill that war immediately based on a deal whereby Russian troops would go back to barracks, back to where they were before the 24th of February based on a deal between Selenski, Biden, Putin and president Xi of China, a deal that would bring the Russians back to their barracks and to give something to Putin. You must give him something in order to agree, a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO along the lines of the Austrian setup during the Cold War where Austria was a fully fled member of liberal Democratic Europe, Social Democratic Europe. It was completely integrated with the West, but it was not a member of NATO. That I thought and that I still think is something that Putin would be able to sell to his own cabinet, as some kind of success.
What did we get instead? John Biden doing two things, two things that guarantee a never-ending war, that will be the destruction of Ukraine and the permanent subjugation of Europe to the United States. The first thing Biden did, was make a statement by which he committed the United States government to dragging Vladimir Putin through the international criminal court, which – by the way – the United States does not recognize. So, this is hypocrisy. Now, how do you grab Putin and put him through the International Criminal Court like Slobodan Milosevic? Either you have to take Moscow which is not likely given that America, Germany, Greece, and France are cowards. We are not sending our own troops to fight with the Ukrainians. We send them guns and we send them third-rate guns and we say to them you go and take Moscow so that we can drag Putin through the International Criminal Court. That is cowardice. That is stupidity. That is a great gift to Putin. Nobody has gifted Puttin more than the West. The West has done everything. Our leaders have solidified the reign of Putin.
The second move they made they confiscate $400 billion of Central Bank Russian money. But they don’t even have the courage to take the money. They are going to issue bonds, backed by this money, to give to the Ukrainians. Now the Ukrainians will never be able to repay those bonds because they’re bankrupt. So, it means that you are setting aside the Russian Central Bank money for the next 10 to 20 years,
depending on the maturity of those bonds. And effectively you are telling Putin that there can be no peace where you take your own money back for 20 years because then and then it will be the creditors the Paris Club banks that will take it.
That is as if the devil wanted to create circumstances for a Never-Ending war that continues to kill people in Ukraine and keeping Putin in power. They would have done the devil that which the Western leaders have done. So no white flag for me.
Non-alignment is not neutral. I do not renounce violence I hate violence I work for peace, but you know I am proud of the Greek partisans who fought during the Greek occupation against the Nazi occupation. And I am proud of Palestinians who resist the apartheid state and I’m proud of people who resist in Ukraine Russia’s Invasion. But I want to be non-aligned. I want us democratically to decide what we Europeans want to happen – not to be told by Washington DC what should happen.

Third Question (Next steps):
What needs to be done? The first steps

Yanis Varoufakis (Next steps):
Finally, what needs to be done? That’s a big question right but let me give you an example. Look, technically a green new deal for the world whereby you energize a large amount of the capital which is sitting around in the financial circuits in Wall Street, in Frankfurt, in the city of London doing nothing useful for humanity. A green New Deal that energizes that money and converts it into green investments in the global South. Technically it is straightforward already the blueprint exists in the Breton Woods conference which I mentioned before. It is the plan by John Manard Kanes which was rejected at Breton Woods brought up to date with all the new instruments of Public Finance that we have. We can do it, so technically it can be done. The reason why it’s not being done is because a lot of money is being made by very few individuals who have bought our politics who have bought our media and who are poisoning with algorithms or conversation preventing us from reaching the decision that is necessary to energize this technological innovations that could save
the planet but will not save the planet unless you folks get off your backs your backsides and take politics into your own hands.

Fourth Question (Fairtrade):
How would you assess the fair-trade movement? Would it change something for the global south?

Yanis Varoufakis (Fairtrade):
Fairtrade is a cop-out. It’s not the answer. Let me give you an example. Sambia, as we speak, is bankrupt and it is negotiating with the International Monetary Fund for one billion dollars. It’s not much and the IMF in order to lend to Zambia again to prevent its bankruptcy is demanding the shutting down of hospitals of schools and the privatization of public common goods – in other words another colonial exploitation of Sambia. Now let me add another crucial number: over the last three and a half years, not four years, not five years, three and a half years, European and American companies extracted from Sambia minerals that they then sold for 26 billion. You take 26 billion from them. They’re indebted by one billion and then our representatives from the International Monetary Fund, which belongs to Europe and the United States go to Zambia and shut down their schools. This is a crime against humanity that no rubbish idea about fair trade and the market can reverse.

Closing Statement Yanis Varoufakis
I’ll just repeat the main story that I shared with you. Europe is becoming geostrategically irrelevant because we have become colonized by the competing powers of the United States and China, the cloud Capital that rules the world which are quick marching us into a new Cold War which may end up, in the new third world war, preventing us from doing anything about climate catastrophe and preventing us from the Urgent redistribution of income from the global North to the global South. And unless you folks take politics into your own hands – humanity has no future.
[Applause]