Yanis Varoufakis

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Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis

Greek Economist and Former Finance Minister

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Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. Previously, he was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis.

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Yanis Varoufakis wrote in this article:

On 8th October, during an interview in Berlin (click adjacent icon and read the full text below), I refused to condemn either Hamas or the Israeli settlers committing atrocities across Israel-Palestine. Instead, I condemned us, Europeans and Americans, as the true villains who, for decades, we stood idly by while the underlying cause of these atrocities, Apartheid, became a fait accompli.

Why did I not take the easier route of, on the one hand, condemning Hamas and, on the other, championing the rights of Palestinians? Because I wanted to make the point that it is we, Europeans and Americans, who must be condemned. Because it is we, Europeans and Americans, who, with our patronisingly ritual moralistic condemnations (whether one-sided or equidistant), have been making Peace impossible in Israel-Palestine.

We allow this by keeping dead quiet when Palestinians are suffering killings, evictions, war crimes. By dismissing Israeli war crimes (like those committed now that Gaza is being turned into a parking lot) as "inevitable", as Acts of God – like a Volcano erupting as is its wont, as its nature dictates. And by issuing stern condemnations of Palestinians, calling them 'animals' and 'savages', when some of them lash out violently, brutally, in response to the slow genocide the Apartheid state is calculatingly foisting upon their families and communities.