Yanis Varoufakis gave a speech alongside Juliet Stevenson, Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, Jeremy Corbyn, Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal at a press conference titled ‘Democracy Under Fire’, at the Foreign Press Association, Royal Overseas League, London, on April 11. Here it is in full:

We are here today because democracy is on death row, because the treasured right to dissent is at gunpoint, because your capacity to do journalism is under fire.

I remember when I came to Britain as a student in 1978 how overjoyed I was to be in a country where I felt safe from the secret police, happy to be living in a democracy where dissent was protected. Back then, I recall Mick McGahey – the legendary Scottish miners’ union leader – warning me: “Don’t take it for granted my lad”, he said. “If democracy threatens to change anything, they will ban it.” I must say I did not believe him. I did not want to believe him. Today, his words are ringing true across this land, indeed across the West.

The West has not recovered from the Crash of 2008. Donald Trump, the British government’s current fiscal mess, Europe’s stagnation, trade wars that are – in reality – vicious class wars – these are all mere symptoms of the wholesale disintegration of the realm of financialised, globalised capitalism that prevailed in the 1970s, riding on the coattails of the Nixon Shock.

• The more concentrated power has become the more brittle its foundations are proving.
• The more brittle its foundations are proving the more determined the powers-that-be become to shut down debate, dialogue, democracy.

This is why the chilling winds of totalitarianism are blowing harder than ever today.

Here in Britain. In Germany. In France. In the United States.

The use of Newspeak is truly meant to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

Just as in the 1930s, a moral clarifier has emerged: Then, you were marked as a problem if you did your duty to defend Jews from Oswald Mosley’s and Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts. Today, you are marked as a problem if you defend Palestinians’ right to exist as Palestinians. The point, as in the 1930s, is to contain dissent.

Fear of incarceration, of deportation, of exclusion is meant to enhance self-censorship and narrow down the range of dissent.

• The narrowing of the range of dissent is meant to narrow the range of what can be thought.
• The narrowing of the range of what can be thought, of what can be imagined, is essential in maintaining control by a regime that is losing control of its own faculties, of its own system.

This is why the system’s political handmaidens in government are working hard to ensure that protest is turned from a fundamental right into a gift from the state.

Perhaps the most remarkable method by which democracy is strangled is this phoney clash between Trumpists, who wax lyrical about free speech of bigots, and the centrists who present themselves as the protectors of core democratic principles. The case of Julian Assange demonstrates perfectly both sides’ hypocrisy.

• Was it not Trump, Biden, Johnson and Starmer who joined forces to criminalise Julian’s brilliant, accurate, essential journalism?
• Are Trump and Starmer not buddies in how they criminalise those of us who refuse to consent to the Palestinian genocide, including our heroic Jewish comrades?

Was it not the whole gamut of the German political centre complicit in banning me from Germany because we dared collaborate with German-Jewish comrades, heroes like Iris Hefetz and Udi Raz, to hold a conference in Berlin under the utterly subversive title “A Just Peace in the Middle East”?

With around forty peaceful left-wingers in prison, here in Britain, today, for the dastardly crime of organising protests that once upon a time would have been considered perfectly legitimate, I feel privileged to appear in front of you here today, honoured to be sitting next to Stephen Kapos and to Chris Nineham in a bid jointly to proclaim and to ring alarm bells:

• that democracy is on death row
• that the treasured right to dissent is at gunpoint
• that your capacity to do journalism is under fire.

It is time we took a stand.

It is time you took a stand.

If not now, tomorrow may well prove too late.

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