DiEM25’s co-founder condemned Europe’s complicity in global conflicts, from Palestine to Ukraine, and exposed the continent’s economic stagnation and subservience to US interests

This morning, just before leaving the hotel to get here [to Amsterdam], somebody on X took a swipe at me for being fixated with Palestine. It was in response to a post celebrating yesterday’s inauguration of the Hague Group. And it seemed that it was a left-wing criticism that I was fixating, we are fixating, with Palestine and there was a long list of other conflicts and tragedies that I was not paying attention to. We’re not paying attention to, like, Goma in the Congo and Sudan, the killing fields of Ukraine, what’s happening in Myanmar, and so on.

And I thought about it for a second, and I realised that I’m proud of being fixated with Palestine. Because if this was 1936, we all would have a moral obligation, an ethical duty to be fixated with the Nazis and their persecution of the Jewish people. If this were the 1960s and 70s, we would have a duty to be fixated with apartheid in South Africa. If this was 1981, we would have an obligation to be fixated over the hunger strikes in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland.

To be fixated in 1936 about the plight of the Jewish people was not to ignore all the other massacres of the British Empire, for instance, in India, in Kenya. No. You fixate on the issue at hand in order to develop firstly your own understanding of what it means to fight against injustice and then to take this fixation and turn it into a global fight for peace, justice, and progress.

This is what we’re doing. In particular, it is essential that this fixation with Palestine is blended with a capacity to recognise the interconnections between our different predicaments. Jeremy and Britt talked about them, the arms trade, the war in the Ukraine.

Europe: From peace project to war cheerleader

It is astonishing that there is a war happening in Europe. And Europe is cheerleading a United States whose only purpose was to keep the war going. Let’s see what Trump is going to do. But so far, the very weak preference of the United States is for a never-ending war. A war that never ends. This is what they want. Like Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu doesn’t want a ceasefire. He doesn’t want peace.

Because his personal interests lie in a never-ending war. And it’s astonishing to have a Europe which was supposedly a peace project, the whole point of the European Union, was celebrated as a way to end wars forever in Europe. And you have a European Union which betrays its own propaganda as to its raison d’etre, by having this half-crazy person, Kaja Kallas, being our foreign and defence representative, the former prime minister of Estonia, who three weeks before she became the European Union’s, um, responsible person for the chief of defence and foreign affairs, advocated in a televised interview the need to break Russia up.

This is madness. This is paranoia. Anybody who believes that should be locked up. Not be made responsible for Europe’s defence and foreign affairs. Now, why did we get there? Why are we – not we, you and me, but our governments – so complicit, not only sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which is what Germany does, but also utterly and constantly supporting the Zionist narrative that the people of Gaza don’t have the right to resist? And the equation of the duty to resist with anti-Semitism. How did we get there? We were not always there. I mean, I remember a very right wing corrupt, but otherwise palatable President of France. Remember Jacques Chirac? Once, he went to the Occupied Territories, and he actually had a physical confrontation with the Israeli soldiers. And he called them names, and he called them an Occupying Force. Now can you imagine Emmanuel Macron doing this today? No way. Even if he believes it, he won’t do it.

Because he is going to be utterly destroyed by Le Monde, by Nouvelle Observateur, by the media. So what happened to Europe? Unless we are fixed with Palestine, we cannot understand it. And let me explain that point. Before I salute you for being here, and before I thank our local group of DiEM25 for putting up this remarkable meeting today. Thank you very much in advance.

The role of the United States in Europe’s decline

Now look, you can see from the moment that Donald Trump gets elected, a man who loathes the European Union, who has put forward a very cogent and logical – I don’t say correct, I say logical – case against the existence of the European Union. Somebody who calls the European Union a leech on American business, and who is going definitely to impose tariffs on German Dutch experts to the United States.

So this man who is the actual nightmare of the liberal establishment in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany, he gets elected. And what do the European leaders do? They compete against one another as to who is going to be the first to lick his boots. So you have a Europe, which is completely and utterly dependent. It is a vassal continent of the United States. Now, we are beginning now to understand why they are completely complicit.

You have a situation whereby the United States, together with Ukraine and maybe Poland, blew up Nord Stream 1, which is an investment of the Federal Republic of Germany in its fuel resources. Now, I’m not saying it was right to invest in that or wrong to invest in that. What I’m saying is that, you know, they blew it up. This was a terrorist attack on a German asset of massive value to the German industry. And what did they do? They looked the other way. And they allow the rumours to spread that it was Putin who blew up his own means of supplying Germany with his own natural gas, which makes no sense. And yet you have the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and so on, going along with that.

Now, why all this magnitude of total dependence on whatever it is that Washington D.C. has decided? Because our governments have given up on democracy, they have given up on sovereignty, and they have become mere subsidiaries of American power.

Well, allow me, because you know, I have a relationship with certain people of a Dutch extraction, like Jeroen Dijsselbloem, for instance.

I have this prior experience of watching them destroy Europe. Because what they did to us, here in Greece, was not just North vs South. It was not just the busy bees, the mighty, highly productive ants of Germany, of Holland, of the North, having a little tussle against the grasshoppers of the South who laze in the sun and don’t work.

This was all bullsh*t. It was a cynical attempt, after the Northern European banks went belly up, to bail them out and to charge the bill to the peoples of Europe, beginning with the ones in the South, because they were the most bankrupt, and then bringing the austerity to the North. This is what they did.

We were the guinea pig, the laboratory of austerity. They practiced some of that, then they came to you, immediately after us, because we are “the blacks of Europe,” as I was told by an Irishman when I was a student and a member of Troops Out in England. So, they took it to Ireland, then they took it to his country, Portugal.

He comes from Portugal. Then from Portugal they took it to Spain, Italy, France, and then to Germany. And to you folks. The reason why your social services are diminishing and so on is that it is this process of austerity for the many and largesse, ‘socialism’ in inverted commas, for the very few. They printed six trillion euros to give to the bankers.

The bankers gave it to the big business. The big business did not invest it. Why did they not invest it? Because they looked at all of us, around you, and they said, “these people don’t have money” as if we are going to invest in products that these people can’t afford. So, what did they do with these six trillion euros?

You know, Bass, Volkswagen, Alstom, and so on. You know what they did? They went to the stock exchange and bought their own shares. Their shares went up, they didn’t invest anything. And you know what? Guess what? Europe, for 15 years, has not invested in anything. Zero net investment in Europe. This has never happened in the history of the universe. To have such a rich continent, has never happened. With all these savings and money, and profits, and real estate, [yet] not investing. But the Chinese and the Americans invested. In green technologies, in what I call cloud capital, algorithms, AI, and all that. And you know what? We’ve become the stupid continent.

We missed out on one whole technological revolution. So, you know, we are now, and we already are, after all these 15 years, on a steady process of secular stagnation. This is not a crisis that will go down and then will go up. For the next 50 years, we are condemned to stagnate as a continent.

When a continent like Europe, which is so powerful and so rich, stagnates, what happens is, the politics starts fragmenting. This is why Emmanuel Macron doesn’t even have the guts of Jacques Chirac. Or, why Olaf Scholz cannot even be like Schröder, who said no to the invasion of Iraq. A despicable poor excuse for human nature Schröder was, but at least he said no to the invasion of Iraq.

Echoes of the 1930s: The rise of the far right

So the point I’m making is that the reason why we are so complacent, the reason why the far right is rising everywhere, universally, is for exactly the same reason why it was rising up in the middle of a period we had in 1929, just like in 2008, Wall Street collapsed. The banks of Europe immediately collapsed after 1929, after 2008, then after that, what happened? Governments started pushing the losses of the bankers onto the shoulders of the weakest of citizens.

After 1930, 1931, after 2009, 2010, exactly the same. It was as if they were trying to replicate the mid war period and then you had an investment strike. Industries were not investing. I explained that. This is exactly what happened in the 1930s. Discontent grew. The left-wing parties, the centre-left parties, overthrew people like Jeremy, people like me, I remember Ramsay MacDonald in the kind of thing that was happening.

The left, the centre left, was purging itself, trying to adopt to the centre, which was shifting increasingly to the right, being pushed by those who genuinely looked at people in the eye and said: “I feel your pain, I feel your pain. You’ve never had it so bad. Your children are going to have a far worse life than you did. I feel your pain. Give me the power, and I’ll make you great again.”

And those were the fascists back then, and they are the fascists today. In this context, a Europe that is politically fragmented, it is becoming a vassal of the powers that be, in this case, Washington D.C., cannot do anything to oppose the never ending war in Ukraine, cannot do anything to oppose its own secular stagnation, and when Netanyahu, along with Genocide Joe Biden, place a whole people, the people of Gaza, on death row – because this is what they did, they placed a whole people on death row – the Europeans, they look like a dog that doesn’t understand what it is that you’re saying to it. You have Ursula von der Leyen – she projects the flag of Israel on the buildings and at the same time, she has to – in the context of explaining why Europe is utterly committed to international law – why she’s not going to abide by the International Criminal Court’s decision to indict Netanyahu. So they are in total disarray. Their utter stupidity, their half-crazed madness, would have been something to write theatre plays about, and to enjoy, if it wasn’t so tragic, for Europe and for the rest of the world.

A call for unity and action

So here is my conclusion. And it is this after a year and a half of these mass massacres that I think Jeremy described so aptly through the eyes of the child that survived the bombing and will be living under this cloud of survival forever under that awful and dark light. We have a situation where the people of Europe have decoupled from their leadership.

The mood, even here in the Netherlands, even in Germany, has shifted. People no longer buy the lie that Israel is defending itself. But our government – look at the case of the Netherlands – the mood has shifted in the people. In your parliament, there is hardly anyone who talks about genocide. Hardly anyone. So what happens when you have this huge disconnect between the people and the elected politicians?

The answer is things like today. Events like this. This is why DiEM25 is calling upon you to join us. This is why the Progressive International is calling upon people around the world to join us. As my great friends and comrades have said, this is a time for unity and for solidarity, for the sake of Europe, for the sake of rationality, of logic, and also for having some fun, because nothing is fun in this life unless we’re all together to fight for what is just.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Photo (c) Adam Newby

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