Neue Debatte - Special Edition - Long Essay on Left Strategy #002 - 04/2017 | Page 51

8 Changing EU-politics and peoples’ governments
“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom,
For trying to change the system from within.
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them.
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”
8.5 On DIEM25 strategy and tactics
DIEM proposes graded political guidelines. Yanis, in your opening
speech in February at “Volksbühne”-theatre in Berlin you presented
your and the initiating group’s graded plan for a “democratization of
the European Union”. You differentiated between “our immediate
priorities”, “the medium term” and our “longer term goals”. 40
Immediate activity:
By this is meant the DIEM initiative for full transparency in EU deci-
sion-making. I reckon this a brainchild of intellectual circles far from
the people's reality. Who is ready to fight for the publication of
minutes in a widely rejected Brussels bureaucracy? It is clear for eve-
rybody that we will never get to know what the establishment is not
willing to make public, with or without minutes of one committee or
other. Yourself Yanis argued that even the British Central Bank and
the US Fed publish minutes. Has this changed anything for the Ameri-
can and British peoples? All the world suspects with good reason the
activities of secret services, secret diplomacy and lobbyism to deter-
mine politics. Corruption and high class background discussion and
decision preparing groups set the course in our nation states. The
political class is obliged to brush all this under the carpet to sell “de-
mocracy” to the people. Thanks to courageous men like Edward
Snowdon and Julian Assange we learn about the unbelievable scope
of ruling class unscrupulousness and the criminal activities of their
political agents. Official minutes will hardly deliver exposing infor-
mation. It is a sort of quixotism to strive for formal transparency,
which could as easily be granted as you will be cheated at the same
time without being able to prove it. You waste your energies on side-
shows, spread illusions on alleged democratic chances and thus fall
back behind political lessons people have learned already. The trans-
parency demand is merely helpful for LOMATI-pilgrims.
The medium term priority:
40
Varoufakis, Speech at Volksbühne (youtube, 02.2016, 17:43 – 22:31).
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