Archive for the ‘Yanis Varoufakis’ Category
What is the problem with Yanis Varoufakis’ appearance in Moscow?
Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis is listed as a speaker at the BRICS Urban Future Forum 2025 to be held in Moscow, Russia, from September 17-18. Jeffrey Sachs was well recieved at last year’s event. Ilya Mateev wonders what Varoufakis hopes to achieve.
1. Education for Russians is good and right. I have no idea of “cancelling those living in Russia” – my approach is precisely the opposite. I do a great deal for education, discussion and bridge-building in Russia, though for obvious reasons I won’t write about this in detail. Overall, I am OBVIOUSLY in favour of any constructive activity involving those in Russia, and I consider this very important.
2. There are no problems with Varoufakis’s book being published in Russian. The book is rubbish and not worth the time spent on it, but that’s another conversation. The very fact of translation can only be welcomed.
3. Varoufakis is a public intellectual and even an activist (well, sort of). He had various options for engaging with Russians. He could have organised a closed Zoom event for Russian readers of his book and spoken with them candidly. After all, his DiEM25 [1] could have taken an interest in Russian opposition and left politics, Russian political prisoners, and so forth. Solidarity at the level of society and grassroots initiatives is both possible and valuable.
4. Varoufakis and his organisation did nothing of the sort. Instead, he went to the Moscow government’s urban planning forum. Such events are dubious in any country – they are thoroughly business establishment affairs, no place for leftists. In Russia there’s an additional factor – war, censorship, the impossibility of even asking a question without risk of criminal prosecution [2]. In such a situation, joining with bankers, developers, Chinese and Saudi surveillance companies is really beyond the pale.
5. Of course, Varoufakis does all this consciously. I think this is how he represents anti-imperialist struggle against the damned West and evil NATO (plus money, attention, first-class flights, etc.). This behaviour (whilst completely ignoring Russian grassroots initiatives) is precisely campism [3] – I’ll hang out with the Kremlin against the White House and Brussels. A dead end in political evolution.
6. The fact that I can’t even call on readers in Russia to ask Varoufakis some pointed question (because I have common sense) precisely demonstrates that he’s wrong to go and is engaging in nonsense. It’s shameful to speak at an event where the audience could get a two-year prison sentence [4] for their questions.
Ilya Mateev is one of the tens of thousands of anti-war Russians living in exile.
P.S.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/ilia.matveev
Translated for ESSF by Adam Novak
Footnotes
[1] DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) is a pan-European political movement founded by Varoufakis in 2016, advocating for democratic reform of EU institutions and progressive economic policies
[2] Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country has implemented increasingly harsh censorship laws, including criminalising “discrediting” the armed forces or spreading “fake news” about the war, with penalties of up to 15 years in prison
[3] Campism refers to the political tendency to reflexively support one geopolitical “camp” against another, often leading to uncritical backing of authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose Western powers
[4] Under current Russian law, individuals can face up to two years imprisonment for various speech-related offences, including “discrediting” the military or spreading information deemed “extremist”
Russian and Ukrainian activists silenced at Greek MeRA 25 party event – Tankie Politics in Action
A shameful story from Athens – source : https://freedomnews.org.uk/2023/03/10/russian-and-ukrainian-activists-silenced-at-mera25-event/ also : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article65987; also
Russian activist Artem Temirov writes on what he sees as a concerning trend within the Hellenic left to fall into a knee-jerk “anti-imperialism” that is in fact anything but.
Author’s note: A significant part of the Greek Left for a very long time has been plagued by narrow anti-Americanism that has replaced genuine anti-imperialism. As a result of that even supposedly more moderate voices on the Left often fell in the trap of siding, even if in a subtle way, with regimes that supposedly oppose the West, regardless of how authoritarian and oppressive they might be. This has created an increasingly widening gap between this Greek Left current and leftist dissidents that come from countries whose governments are perceived by the former as “anti-imperialist”. It seems that the former are disinterested in listening to those who have come to seek refuge and avoid arrest and torture. There have even been recorded cases of representatives of the more hard-line pro-Putinist Left in Greece physically attacked an Iranian refugee at a public event, because the latter protested the pro-Putinist, pro-Mullah propaganda he was hearing. The case presented below, if much milder in regards the confrontation, represents continuation in this worrying trend of Greek leftists refusing to listen to the voices of those who have lived under the boot of supposed “anti-imperialist” regimes. This comes to indicate an ideological dogmatism, as well as a loss in trust in the abilities of common people to self-organize and initiate from below revolutionary change. In the imaginary of such leftists greater hope for social change is placed not on the potentials of popular self-determination and self-emancipation, but on foreign geopolitical powers. This must be perceived as drastic counter-revolutionary regression towards Stalinist type of thinking that can only nurture authoritarian logics.
Last year, my wife and I arrived in Greece. While I am a Russian citizen, my wife is a citizen of Ukraine. She left Kyiv a week after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I left Russia a few days later because it became dangerous to stay there with an anti-war position, with both us always holding left-wing and antifascist positions. In Greece, we are living under a temporary protection program for Ukrainian families.
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Tomás Ó Flatharta 