Trump Has Lost Everything Yanis Varoufakis The Exchange

TITLE: “Trump has lost everything” | Yanis Varoufakis | The Exchange CHANNEL: The New Statesman DATE: 2026-04-01 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I grew up in a fascist dictatorship that had that view and now it’s all back. This Labor Party is utterly toxic to anyone who has basic ethical standards. I have a court date on the 16th of December which will be fun. Last week, Janis Farufacis, 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. Zack Palansky was there. Jeremy Corbyn was there. Verifakus’ mission to explore what resistance means for the left today. I sat down with him the next day in the New Statesman 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. I’m Ollie Dugmore. You’re listening to the exchange from the New Statesman. Here’s my conversation with Jannis Verifakis. Janis Farrafakis, 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 plananes so much? You know how boys are. Um 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, my family. Greece didn’t have television. Came in

Um you know the cinemas were full of war movies. So, you know, the the Stooka was uh you know, it was a Stooka and the Spitfire and you know, so um but I think you what you’re alluding to is that um uh this is the opening pages of my book. When 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. Um, to visit my favorite uncle, her brother. And you know, I saw him. He had just been through horrendous torture. He was uh sentenced to life imprisonment for um resisting the regime. And he had uh made he was an engineer uh quite accomplished one. He had made out of matchsticks and uh carton paper from cigarettes uh cigarettes. Uh he had managed to make a paper mold, an airplane model out of paper match took and he presented it to me and I was elated by that until I realized that it was a ruse. What was it for?

Well, firstly, he had painted the spastica and the iron cross beautifully on top of it. And the reason why he did it was because our well his centuries uh 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 uh indulge his uh deep-seated evil by grabbing it and as if it was a paper plane threw it at the wall. Uh that was his way of um essentially uh baiting my mom to respond so that he could be there. It was a very brutal regime. My 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 that discovered to find um a message from my uncle to his comrades uh hoping to coordinate their defense at the court marshal that followed. So I was being used, but it it was very exciting. You know what? You know, people think, “Oh, what terrible events to have marked the childhood.” They’re dead wrong. Yeah. I remember all that. Like a great adventure. Your uncle had participated in a in a bombing campaign, right, against the against the dictatorship. Yeah. And if I understood correctly, your mother was opposed to that use of violence in a in a way. She was skeptical of it. uh she didn’t celebrate violence but she didn’t condemn it either because we lived in a very violent regime. Uh what was interesting about my uncle unlike my dad who was a committed lefty who had spent four years in a concentration camp for leftwingers back in the 1940s my uncle was an establishment figure. you know, thinking back decades afterwards of that character, my uncle, it it really is now allowing me to understand the architecture of power, of authority, of um establishment culture uh much much better because he was up until 1967 when the tanks rolled on our states and the constitution was suspended and parliament was shut down. He was in British terms um on the verge between the Tories and Farage. So he was a rightist who nevertheless believed that authoritarianism on the part of the state uh was uh an essential uh 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. Um you know he was of the belief which is also a Thatcherite belief that uh to preserve liberalism you need a state that is authoritarian number 1984 the minor strike and so on. So that was his view until the thugs that he considered to be the centers of you know buzz democracy uh took over the government um suspended the constitution and that’s when he flipped by the way he was a very high ranking member of the establishment he was a CEO of Zemens in Greece and southern Europe the German multinational corporation and that effectively made him even more important than a minister of the state because Zemens constructed the whole of the uh 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. And therefore when one day he turned up at the ministry with a Samsonite full of seexs and because he was dealing even with the dictators the ministry under the fascist dictatorship and you know he at some point he excused himself he used the personal private toilet of the minister and planted the bomb took out the whole floor the whole top floor of the ministry at 4:00 in the morning. probably got hurt. But um 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 he was kept she was skeptical of him afterwards but at the same time she was proud of him. So she you know uh 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 uh and not condemning his bombs even if you’re skeptical about his bombs. I I want to talk more about uh 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 um critical of your uncle up until the moment she sort of witnessed him in incarcerated. That 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. Uh, but at the same time, I can’t say that violence should ever be used because I experienced, you know, the tanks coming down Paticon Avenue in Greece in November 1973, crashing the students, uh, machine gunning demonstrators. uh and you know anybody who says to me that uh well the demonstrations don’t have the right to resist violently you opposing violence with violence it’s that’s some that that’s for me a bridge too far. Uh so the question is where do you draw the line? Uh and I think we draw the line when you’ve exhausted all possibilities of maintaining basic standards of human dignity without resorting to violence. uh we’re nowhere near that in Western Europe now even though we have uh obnoxious authoritarianism by our authorities. We can see what’s happening here with uh Palestine action. Uh what’s happening in Germany where you know colleagues of yours have been rendered non-persons for having written about Palestine. I was banned from entering Germany. Uh 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. And 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 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 it 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, nauseiatingly right-wing for me, but at the same time, somebody who when his own side crossed that threshold that we talked about, he took up took up arms at great cost himself against them. somebody 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 um um 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 uh highly faded. But he decided not to use any of that and to fade into oblivion. uh because he was worried that in the post Breton Woods world after 97 the 1970s with the coming of neoliberalism he knows his own side of you know the upper echelons of the capitalist class were contributing to uh society’s uh steady decline uh so he 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 speak within me because we all have it. We boys um the fascist 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 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 Emir Kustoita the renowned former Yugoslav film director uh 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 the nationalist Serb nationalist you don’t want you know what I 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 dsttovski who was a very dark character I’m sure he there were really nasty aspects about that we should be able to transcend the black and white the if 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 I will fight nationalism to the Throughout, you mentioned it there. Throughout Raise Your Soul, you repeatedly turn to female role models for inspiration. I mean, could you just talk to me a little bit about that choice to to center and foreground women in that 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 live in this country and we lost the minor strike and that was pretty depressing but you know since then I hadn’t been so depressed as I was in 2023 2024 we had several electoral defeats there was 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 I don’t it’s not because I have a book contract it’s not because I you know I’m committed to some kind of magazine or periodical to write. So therapy for me means okay now what what’s going to my make my soul feel better if I and I was harboring a certain guilt over my mother because my penultimate book technofidalism was written as a long form letter to my father who was um an inspiration and so on. But then when I finished writing that which was all a conversation with my dead father um 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 uh 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, then 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. um that okay now my father who was so inspirational also so much so that I wrote a whole book you addressing him debating him well his mentor was his mother whom I never met because she died in the 1950s and but nevertheless she was very influential on me through him so I started writing her story so one thing led to another and I had this a book that started 1993 when Anna my father’s mother who by the way was uh 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 uh from 1923 to the 1960s 970s where I existed and then I thought okay 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 peloponese and that took me to my English years and yeah, 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 uh 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 um explain how a boy grew up through the influence of women that um 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. You you recently said on fighting misogyny you said it got better and then it got worse. Could 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 womanhating was per it was simply not done that it was unfashionable that uh anybody who dared uh you know proclaimed that women should go back to the home and that they someh 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. Yeah, it was you. 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 uh we thought we could take it for granted. That explicit misogyny uh the manosphere uh 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 uh and now it’s all back. And it’s all back at the same time as fascism and military kianism. 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 you spoke about the trade war as relates to with China um 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 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. What I said, I know what I said in December 2025, few months ago, was that the lessons of 2025 are that uh President Xi of China won the trade war with the tariff war with um Trump. Trump won the tariff war with the European Union and uh Putin won the discussive war regarding regarding Ukraine. Not that he took give, thank goodness, but um you know the Europeans are absolutely have absolutely they’re to totally clueless about what 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. Uh what Trump has done however by um essentially being allowing himself to become corrupted to Israel because this is what happened. I mean you heard Joe Kent it’s really very simple. The argument was that uh Israel is going to bomb Iran. Uh 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. uh 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 coped by Netanyahu in another war in the Middle East, especially with Iran. It is only it’s my my consider opinion that um Trump was winning everything up until he allowed himself to be dragged into this war by Netanyahu. And now he’s going to lose everything. I think that now his political project is finished. Kaput. Okay. Let’s well let’s let’s talk about that then. Yeah. My 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 the 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 you know uh Christian nationalists, white nationalists etc. So is it your contention that essentially that that central plank that nationalist populist piece of the base that is against forever wars it is against foreign military entanglement and is pretty explicitly isolationist that by participating in this project that he’s alienating that part of his base. Is that is that your contention? Yes. Well, look the he has been betraying the blue collar base of the MAGA movement uh since day one. Uh if you look at the big beautiful bill for instance, it was you know piece of class war against his own base. Uh he effectively decimated them. But uh it wasn’t enough to derail his project because he had the tech oligarchs, he had Wall Street on his side and he could still do things like you know abduct Maduro and pacify part of the blue collar base on the basis of patriotism that oh look we are winning right but you know when uh the average uh Trump supporter travels 110 10 miles to go to work and come back. That’s the average. And they barely make ends meet with the [ __ ] jobs that they have, right? David Greer’s scientific term. Um uh 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, uh, if he hasn’t lost them already. And because he was dragged into this war with Israel, uh, effectively he was put on the escalation um, escalator and he can’t get off that escalator now without, you know, he needs to jump off to make um, huge miracle kulpa. 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 to work uh at least uh in the medium term. He’s going to be stigmatized if he does that. If he doesn’t do that and he stays on the escalate escalation escalator, then uh he’s go down the way, you know, the way that uh George W. Bush has become synonymous with a major debacle. But what’s to worry about, Janice? I mean, America’s a net 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 the net exporter and every citizen was a shareholder in USA Inc. right of course but you know if you’re a blue collar worker uh you don’t get any of the dividends of Chevron and Exon Mobile do you? No. No you don’t. Um are European nations complicit in this war? Oh absolutely. How? Well, Ramstein, Acroi, these are bases in Cyprus. Appallingly, it is British sovereign territory. Rammstein is a German base. Friedick Merks Merz, the chancellor of Germany can kick and scream that he doesn’t agree with this war. Kmer can say he doesn’t agree with his war. Well, if you don’t agree with this war, I mean, would you let Iran use your soil to wage war against somebody else? Um, you wouldn’t. Why would you let the United States wage a war which you think is detrimental to the interest of your country and of the West and of humanity only because you simply don’t exist. You are a non you are a figment of our imagination. Star, you know, is a prime minister that could simply not be there. Uh there could be, you know, 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 5 minutes and then does a chaku as the Australians say you know does a youth turn. Yeah. Uh yeah the vizier recalled to the imperial court and a new adversary dispatched to the outpost of empire. Um I guess to do my to represent the government’s position on this they would counter and say uh we have only permitted the use of these bases for defensive operations. I might to take from Eurum up. So when bombers leave the British base of Aeri and they go over Iran and they kill children that’s defensive. Okay. Then of course George Orwell is having a field day quite in terms of double speak. Quite um 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 satellite. Well, the beauty of these long form discussions is that I can give you the chapter and verse on this. Absolutely. It’s uh it was around 1999 2000 when um somebody in the Greek for foreign ministry somebody who was a friend of mine Nicholas Kiasa who was an adviser to the then foreign minister of Greece Jose Papandrea who later became prime minister um proposed uh a new dogma a new uh strategy for Greece and that was uh 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, you know, decades of tensions between Greece and Turkey, the idea is that, you know, Greece was never strong enough to counter Turkey, but Israel that is at odds with Turkey could become our strategic ally. And that was adopted in the early 2000s by George Papandreo, the social democrat. Then it was a taken over by the right-wing government, the Tories of Greece. Uh and interestingly this continued uh for the 6 months I was in government that was not a policy but 6 hours after my resignation on the 6th of July of 2015. Maybe it’s a coincidence. I don’t think so. Uh the prime minister with whom I had just fallen out um gave the green light to Nikos Kias that gentleman who was at that time foreign minister of Greece to fly to Tel Aviv and signed a deal which actually is quite a colonial one. It gives uh 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. that yeah that that’s becoming a satellite of another country and since then this current centeright ultraright 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 ultraionism they become Netanyahu’s uh um not so much ally but um handmaidaiden and um they have sold out uh most of the Greek defensive industry, defense industry, uh to Israeli companies, uh our prime minister has been caught red-handed spying on his own ministers using Israeli uh tech algorithms and spying surveillance uh uh methods. Uh and now that uh the United States and Israel are uh bombarding Iran into smitherines um he the prime minister of Greece is getting um boost in the polls because he’s playing the nationalist card. How our audience may have heard of or remember that in 1974 the Turkish army invaded Cyprus and took over the northern part. Um it doesn’t matter why and how, but this was a major defeat for Greece and the Greek criates. And since then, Cyprus has been the north part has been occupied by the Turkish army and Greece has um effectively uh fallen behind this strategic game with Turkey. for the first time a Greek frigate. It is now off the coast of Cyprus with F-16 for F-16 Greek Air Force planes stationed on the island. Uh supposedly to defend Cyprus from Iran. There was one drone that the Iranian sent to bombard the Aceri base. Now, by the way, the Acer base, I have to make this point again. I made it before, I’ll repeat it, is 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 Greece as a great victory against Turkey which is absolutely astonishingly um you know I would say irrational but it is not because I think that you know the prime understands very well but what he’s doing is he’s playing to the nationalist Greek audience uh saying, “Look, we now are pushing back Turkey.” What 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 of Cyprus between the Greek and the Turkish part is a tragedy. Uh effectively, we have a Berlin wall going through not only Nikicoia, but the whole of the island. I mean the rational way forward would be to reunify the island on the basis of of a biccommunal uh peace deal whereby the criates can you know look after Cyprus and they can become sovereign again with Greece and Turkey and Britain getting out of there. That would be the rational thing but it will be in the interest in in our national interest in Turkeykey’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. Uh they build up weaponry. They introduce new austerity because the money that is being spent on weapons is not being spent on hospitals and then everybody’s worse off except the powers that be that solidify their illegitimate power and the defense companies. Yanice 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. Um, in that context then about nationalism, can you could you project forecast a little bit the sort of medium-term consequences particularly for K star and his unwillingness to confront Trump over this issue? I mean in the uh British domestic press listeners will know you know the the adults in the room the sensibles are sort of praising this as an instance of you know Britain expressing its sovereign interest standing up to the Americans not permitting them to use British bases for offensive operations as they see it. You don’t see it that way. So, what are the medium-term consequences of that decision in his his inability or his lack thereof to properly confront Donald Trump over this issue? Well, the moment you uh use Orwellian double speak in order to make it impossible for um 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 of Britain. Instead, it is we have a fake discussion as to you know did uh Karma buckle or did he not buckle? It’s clear he buckled. Okay. Now you can um call you can baptize as we say in Greece uh um meat into fish so that you can pretend to be fasting when you’re not. This is what’s happening here. uh but this is simply depleting the capacity of British society to have a decent conversation about uh what its real interests are. For instance, are the interests of the United Kingdom served by being part of NATO and uh 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 uh the wararmongering the um fake invocation of military tensionism. So you know in Europe not just in Britain but in the European Union and in the United Kingdom you know over the last 20 years especially after the you know great financial crisis of 2008 uh it’s very clear that we what we’re lacking across Europe UK EU is uh 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. Uh the Chinese have the answer in Europe and in the UK we talk about it and we do nothing about it. Okay. Uh and the only uh show in town is military engine. They’re talking about you know investing in uh the technologies of the defense industry. But they’re not even doing that. They are talking about that. If you look at Karma’s policy, you know, they’re taking a few misly millions away from foreign aid. Uh, which is which is, you know, it’s 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 um, you know, Leonardo in Europe and so on. uh where you know which is a bottomless pit 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. Essentially this debate the way it is unfolding in Britain and in the European Union uh 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 leftwing support in the UK? Do you think the two 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 Lewis, like John McDonald who still in the Labor Party. I mean, this Labor Party is utterly toxic to anyone who has basic ethical standards, not just left-wing people. I mean, you know, can you get more rightwing than Tony Blair? No. But Tony Blair never expelled Tony Ben. He never expelled Ken Loach from the Labor Party. This gentleman Kirst. Uh the audacity to get rid of every leftwinger that um speaks out for traditional you know progressive values to get rid of Ken Roach 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 Labor Party that chose not to have uh access to uh you know leftist support. Uh it’s not the other way around. It’s not that leftist decided not to support Karma. Kama simply took a you know exit stage left or right I should say the um I mean I should should should tell listeners we’re speaking it’s the day after your birthday which you celebrated with 2,000 other people uh including Zack Palansky Jeremy Corbyn Grace Blakeley all on a stage in 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 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. What’s your understanding? Well, after the great financial collapse uh led to the Osbor Cameroon uh policy of socialism for the bankers and austerity, harsh austerity for everybody else. Uh you had uh in this country uh 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. Uh we saw this in 2015 2016 it uh partly found expression through Jeremy Corbin’s leadership of the Labor party momentum and so on. And where the left fails to inspire people with a positive agenda, uh, the altaright comes in with a destructive, toxic, negative agenda. We saw this in the Brexit referendum, the right-wing fascistic Brexit, um, you know, project which in the end won. Uh and it won because in the end the Labor Party can always be counted upon or at least the the deep Labor Party, the you know the the deep bench of the Conservative Labor Party uh to essentially you know pull the plug of any progressive project uh because in the end in the same way that the Democrats prefer Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders um hoping that they would make a comeback with somebody like Biden or Kamal Harry. Similarly, the deep bench of the uh Tories within the Labor Party um preferred Boris Johnson to Jeremy Corbin. And once you know Jeremy’s uh base um was disillusioned uh you had the burgeoning of the rightist movement of the monosphere of the Tommy Robinson supporters of reform but you still had um uh a leaderless uh movement that needed to you know move in the progressive direction and that’s where Zach Pollanski by Rebranding the Greens as an ecosocialist party uh created a bridge of hope between those who want a radical transformation of society so as to um change the dist the distribution of income to have a wealth tax. I think it was very smart on Zach’s uh 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 um the model of growth under capitalism especially in the last few decades is ecosidal. It is depleting the it is making it impossible for humanity to acquies in its own survival. And I so I think that you know Zach has been a a breath of fresh air as I keep saying. Uh but I still you know the reason why we connived and I use this verb uh 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 strands of the progressive movement need to work together. Let’s stop being stupid folks, you know, because the left has been, you know, remember the opening scenes in the life of Brian. We 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. tapling on 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 far whether it’s Trump there are key differences whether it’s uh demography uh you know significant young male population de recently demobbed with military training there are paralle else perhaps if you were to look at the technological arena and the sort of the closeness of I mentioned uh the key part of the MAGA coalition earlier uh technological advances that are tied to the Trump movement. I think I’ve seen you use the term protofascism to talk about what’s happening now. Is Nigel Farage a fascist? Why don’t you why do you draw that distinction? Why do you use the word proto? Like talk to me about that. I’ve graduated to fascism now because events are cataclysmic. the last two, three, five, six months. Look, I’m not going to call Faraj a fascist or Trump a fascist, but I’m going to say that that movement is a fascist movement um 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 uh um the manner in which uh fascism rose up in the 1920s and 1930s. And I’m going to say this only. The 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 1929, like 2008. that leads to a great depression, great recession, let’s call it whatever it is, you know, deflationary process, uh, unemployment, uh, discontent, socialism for the very few, for big business by the liberal establishment, okay, 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 gaining getting into government or getting into government as we did in Greece and then betraying the cause uh and doing a flip-flop. Uh so the left fails and then what happens is some very smart populists, rightist fascistic populists. Uh what they do is they copy plagiarize the language of the left when it comes to criticizing banks, big business and chronic capitalism. So if you look at the speeches of uh you know somebody like Hitler himself or Gibbles actually Gibbles is a better example he was a smart man compared to Hitler much smarter uh the first page of every speech that I’ve read by Gibbles I could have written it’s just a leftwing critique of chronic capitalism of finances financialization and so on and then okay so there’s the first thing they do the second thing they do is they present themselves as more neoliberal than while critiquing chronic capitalism, you know, say, “Oh, you know, the market uh you the crosser, the butcher, the the baker, the brewer, uh um they’re being smashed, the state, you know, the 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 tries or labor, it’s the same party. So that’s the next step. Very soon after that they start evoking um a fictitious golden past, a golden era age that they promise to bring back uh and to look after the poor, to look after the needy, to double or triple minimum wages, double or triple minimum pensions, right? Something neoliberal wouldn’t do. And sometimes when they get into power like Victor Ruban in 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 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. uh the attack on public servants on public servants the attack on the BBC the attack on all these institutions which are being presented as communist you 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 um and then at some point more recently in order to distance themselves from their anti-semitic past from the Holocaust they bathe themselves into you ultra Zionism. Um, so you know, instead of attacking the Jew, they’re attacking the Muslim, the left hooker, the it doesn’t matter, you know, the trans. So, and and the why did I stop talking about protofascas and start talking about fascism? Because the what I was saying when I was using the term protofascism is that for fascism to become full-blooded fascism, they have to be in alliance with big business. and 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 and 30s until I was a switch you know uh a lever against the left against the communist they backed the fascists on the base that they can control them uh 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. Uh and finally when you you have them in power immediately what they do is they betray their own base the blue collar workers the proletarians that they promised to look after. They get into power and look at the big beautiful bill by uh Trump. If Faraj gets in into Tentaning Street, the first thing he’s going to do is he he’s going to go into into bed proverbally with big business and he 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 h we are in the clasps of fascism. We’re running out of time. Jiannis, I did want to talk more to you about economics, but you mentioned deflationary crisis there and the spectre of this war in Iran is that we may well end up with stagflation and 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. Many commentators are hoping that u this war is going to prove as insignificant in the medium-term as the liberation day tariffs by Trump because you remember when he introduced these huge tariffs. uh the liberal establish establishment was uh screaming blue murder feeling that it will be recessionary it will be inflationary it will be all those things that stagflation will result and it didn’t happen so they are now hoping that you know if uh the war in Iran stops soon enough then again in a few months time we will have forgotten about it but this time they’re very wrong and the reason is um there are multiple reasons the first one is that tariffs uh 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 that those tariffs were absorbed by the oligopolistic uh vendors. The second main reason is that in the United States at least the recessionary effects of the tariffs were canceled out by a wave of huge investment in AI but 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 uh 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 the cost from rising. All they can do is crush the economy, create a huge um unemployment surge and therefore to reduce inflation by means of this uh sledgehammer of um a recession that 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 um 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 um there’s nothing we can do to contain inflation and prevent stuck inflation. 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 sort of slightly counterintuitive that first of all it will take 10 years to come online but then also surely one of the lessons from uh being heard 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 for reopening the North Sea. And I’m not sure that the people who always wanted to destroy the planet uh faster in order to line up the pockets. Look, this is just pathetically stupid. Uh firstly, it will take 15 years for new developments to come online. Okay? So, this is not a short-term uh fix for what is a short-term or a medium-term problem. Secondly, what we need to seriously reconsider is the very notion of an electricity market. Only there can be no such thing as an electricity market. I mean in this studio there is one wire that comes out bringing electricity into this machinery all over us. You don’t have 50 ones from different companies um with 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 uh suppose that I mean already in Britain you have a very good record of almost 50% some depends on the day of uh your electricity being produced at zero marginal cost through renewables mainly windmills wind wind turbines uh that those kilowatt hours are produced at zero marginal cost and you are 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 mindbogglingly ridiculous. I mean of course it isn’t if you are the company that is selling um this very cheap electricity at this exorbitant price. But from our perspective you know we have to reconsider what that did. She took a perfectly usable and serviceable public um utility without had theap 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 interest 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. Even 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. uh a price predicated on the cost of the one 2% that is produced by natural gas. That is madness. But of course, it’s extremely lucrative and it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a great earner 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, Jennice, 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 wonder 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 uh invited by the managing director of BMW to deliver a keynote speech at the BMW Foundation Berlin while that ban was valid. So 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. 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 ollie. Lo and behold, miraculously that court case gets uh 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. I don’t want to get you in to more trouble by asking you more questions about that, Janice. There’s no 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 what’s politically motivated it’s it’s pathetic I’m being I’m being um tried I have a court date on the 16th of December which will be fun uh for um propagating drug use because I said to a bunch of youngsters that yes I did take some ecstasy um 37 years ago in Sydney at a party and gave me lots. It was great fun. I danced like crazy. Then I gave me a huge migraine. 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. The 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 um what what is interesting and I think this is important the sequence the ne the propaganda department of the right-wing party they called the truth commission I mean they have a sense of humor right orient which is of course exactly opposite to 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 say that it was fun and they blasted blasted all over the social media. Two 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 ultrarightist fascistic because as I said in Greece, we have imagine a coalition of um uh I wouldn’t even say far of the Tories and Tommy Robinson. Yeah. So the the 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 farist or Tommy Robinson like party from stealing part of his uh clientele you know voters. He has them in government and he’s given them the ministries that they need in order to conduct their cultural wars like the ministry of health the ministry of migration. uh somebody who said that the only way to stop migration is to have blood in the Egypian is the minister of migration. Um so he lets them you know speak to their audience by saying oh look we are giving a hard time to some leftwinger like Vufakis. So it is it it it really is uh very sad for the judiciary that they are being dragged through this mud by the ultraright. And uh 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. Um, speaking of dancing all through the night, do you know you’re actually going viral in Russia recently? There’s a there’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. Um, in a world that makes increasingly less sense. Yopakis, why should we choose the path of most resistance? Because it’s fun and it, you know, life is not worth 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 Farrafacus, thank you so much for your time.