Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Vijay Prashad: America’s Finger-Wagging Puts Global South in Danger

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Vijay Prashad—Indian historian, journalist, award-winning author, and Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—talks about how history can teach us about humanity. Covered in this conversation: What hooked Vijay into writing, the Ukraine-Palestine double standard phenomena, multipolarity, US democracy, de-dollarization, the Global South leadership, and more. This is the final part of The Shifting World Order Series. Recorded on December 12, 2023. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #VijayPrashad ---------------------- Vijay's portrait is from a video of  @thinkersforum4149 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIhk0EcUi14&t=160s ---------------------- About the host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and currently a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University. Gita is also just appointed as an Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. ---------------------- Understand this Episode Better: https://sgpp.me/eps176notes ----------------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] | https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id | https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: International Guests | Wandering Scientists | The Take Visit and subscribe: SGPP Indonesia | Visinema Pictures

There's nothing special about the United States. You know, what makes the U.S. think that it's better than Indonesia, for instance? Why should the Indonesian president have to defer to the U.S. president? VJ. Prashad. He is the executive director of the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. As a historian and a journalist. And he has all these things, a writer, editor, mentor, and public intellectual. VJ Prashad.

Democracy doesn't mature when you get the most expensive voting system. Democracy is in the head. It's not in the machine. You love lecturing us because you have a colonial mentality. I think it's a terrible piece of advice to tell young people, to be an intellectual, you should be dispassionate. No. There's two things about war zones that people don't get.

They see the death. But what they don't get is the banality of the war. war zone, the noise is incredible. And secondly, what has become banal is the dust, the debris, the amount of toxic material. It's no sense knowing things, no sense being right about things. If you don't do anything about it, you should be deeply moved by things in the world. Hi, friends and fellows, welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas

that I think would be of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far, and welcome to the special series. Hi, my guest today is Vijay Prashad, who is an award-winning writer, and he's also the executive director at the Tri-Continental. Vijay, it's such an honor to have you. on our show. It's my honor. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Thanks for making a time. I want to start off with

just asking you a little bit about your upbringing. You were born and grew up in Calcutta. Just talk a little bit about some of the things that you grew up with that have made you the way you are and what you are today. Please. Well, you know, if people understand Asia, which is really not so easy for people who have never lived in Asia, you'll understand that our worlds are both very complicated, where the ancient world is right in front of us. You know, we don't have a break from the past. You walk out of your door,

and you've got a direct link to a thousand years of history, perhaps more. But you also have a link directly to great inequality. The great inequality is, of our time. I lived in Calcutta, which is a city that again has a history that goes back several hundred years. I literally walked out of my apartment building as a young person and there was an old, one of the oldest British buildings that had been built when the British first came and colonized Bengal in the 1700s. It was still sitting there. It was about, you know, I don't know, one of these amazing old colonial administrative buildings of the East India

company, a shell of what it had been, of course, in the past, but it was still there. The past grips you in Asia, you know, it grips you. It's difficult to escape from the past, you know, when when people talked about, well, you know, you can refashion yourself in modernity, all the European writers on modernity talking up, you know, like George Simmel, talking about how you can be anonymous in the city and you can be a new person and a modern person and so on. In Asia, it's complicated because you're gripped by the past. We haven't had a complete break from some of the best of our traditions and some of the worst of our traditions.

In India, for instance, the caste system, alive and well, right there, sometimes not outside your door, but unfortunately within people's homes, you know, it's right there. the past, the inequality, all of that was a great learning experience for me. And again, one of the interesting features in many societies in mind, certainly, is that almost everybody was involved in politics, one way or the other. It's very difficult in, say, Bengal of the early 1970s for a person not to have a political opinion. I mean, you know, for gosh sake, you know, there was a street where the Indian member, the British consulate, the High Commission and the American consulate on this

street called Harrington Street. It was named after Lord Harrington, an old British colonial official. Well, the government that was there in the early 1970s, a sort of center-left government under pressure from mass demonstrations renamed that. street, Ho Chi Minh Surini, so that the U.S. and British offices were on a name, a street named Ho Chi Minh Street. That's the Calcutta I grew up in. I had family members who were communist. I had family members who were complete centrist. And I had family members who were with the right wing parties. You know, everybody had an opinion. That's what I'm trying to say. Because this grip of the past, this immense inequality, the charged nature of Asia in the 1970s,

made it impossible for people to just sit back and say, you know what, I'm going to make money, I'm not interested in politics. Those were just not available to me. So I grew up in a household of debate, discussion. My father was extremely opinionated, man who had, you know, no formal college at all, but, you know, like to read all kinds of things. You know, was always enthusiastic to learn things. In fact, he bought a set of the encyclopedia only so that I could read it out to him. If he was reading the newspapers and he saw Indonesia, that's interesting. What is Indonesia?

Son, I would sit down, open the encyclopedia, Indonesia. Well, Indonesia is one of the largest countries in the world, archipelago, blah, blah, blah, population X, Y, Z, mainly Muslim population. You know, he would want that because he wanted to learn. My mother was a very much, you know, very connected person to the suffering in the world. Would, you know, take me out to get involved in things. In fact, I just want to say the best explanation for why I'm a little crazy is what my parents did on my birthday.

When I got so many presents from people, those presents would be kept in a room in the house and I would be brought in there in the evening. Nothing was open, you know. They would be received grandparents, whatever, and they would be sitting there. I couldn't look at the cards or anything. My parents would make three piles of my presence.

Sight unseen, you understand. I didn't know what was in the wrapping. Three piles. Now, if there was a bicycle that was different, although I never received a bicycle. It would have been obvious. Yeah, just to say. But then what they would do is one pile went into a box

and I could access the box through the year. That if I did something, you know, that they thought was a very good thing, I could get a present from the box. That was one third. One third was given to me to open right there. You know, happy birthday, son, here are your presents. One third was put in another box. The next day, my mother and I would go to a,

and we distribute these presence to the children. Very interesting way to be raised. I used to resent it as a child thinking, you know, come on, at least let me choose the gifts I don't want. But my parents said if you choose the gifts you don't want, you're not really giving something to somebody. Because then you're deciding this is not for me. You know, it's, I don't need it anyway.

I'm giving it to you. You really give something to somebody when you actually might want it. and that's a real gift. So I just want to say, you know, they were not perfect parents. They had all kinds of flaws. But because of that real grip of history, you know, the past that you and I inherit, that past that includes the glories of Buddhism, for instance, you know, about how to live in a just society, we come from that past, but we also had to deal with severe inequality.

And then people like you and I come from interesting families. where they come up with these crazy ideas, son, it's your birthday, but it's not just your day. It's a day you must share with people who are not as fortunate as you. And I would say that's what it meant to be growing up in Asia and the 1970s. Interesting, interesting. Then you made a decision to go to Pomona. They're on to Chicago, right? And when was it that you decided that you wanted to try.

travel the world and write whatever you've written so far. You've written more than 40 books, man. I mean, that's that's not an easy task. Well, the first thing I should say is that the decision to go to college at Pomona College in the United States wasn't an easy decision. Right. I, in fact, you know, I was very much rattled by two events that took place in India in 1984. One was the riot against the Sikh community of northern India, but particularly Delhi. My mother comes from a Sikh family and the massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in broad daylight really affected me a lot. Obviously, I knew that a country like India is not perfect. None of our countries are perfect. I'd grown up in a in a Calcutta where I saw refugees come from Bangladesh

into our neighborhood after the liberation of Bangladesh 1971, a genocidal war that was there for the founding of Bangladesh. I wasn't naive, you know, and yet, you know, the killing of 3,000 Sikhs over a weekend in Delhi, really rattled. And then very much at the same time, there was an explosion at a Union Carbite factory in Bhopal when several thousand people were killed in, you know,

an attack of, I don't know what else to call it, but it was a form of corporate terrorism because Union Carbide knew that the safety mechanisms at that plant was simply not working. And yet, in order to make more money, they just let it go. And the plant, it was an enormous bomb in the city of Bhopal. These things bothered me. I had enrolled in college in Delhi. It just couldn't focus my attention. And my father and mother basically said to me, go and live with your brother.

My brother was working in California in a car parts business. And they said, just go and start working with him, see how it goes. So that's what I did. I basically left to kind of focus my brain. But I want to back up because this desire to write about things from around the world actually comes from two years prior to that. Because in 1982, you know, I must say, there's something interesting about print newspapers of that era.

1982, I remember going into the library and looking at the daily newspaper and on the cover was a photograph which really struck me. It was of a row of dead bodies and a woman who looked like somebody out of a medieval kind of storybook with a headscarf around her neck,

bent over these bodies. And in the caption, it said something about the city of Beirut. And it said something about Palestinians massacred in Beirut. And, you know, obviously at the time, I didn't know what Sabra and Shatila was. I barely knew what Beirut was. But remember, I was trained to have a lot of curiosity. Son, go get the encyclopedia. Read out the entry on Beirut. So I studied that and I remember writing my first article for a newspaper, small paper that I was working with in my school at the time.

I wrote an article about what had happened in the city of Beirut, 1982. I must say, that event of 82, Beirut struck me that this kind of atrocity, that photograph, the importance of that, I said to myself, and I very much remember as vivid memory, I'm an early teenager, and I said, if I in India am so moved by this photograph, this profession is important. And I would like to document things like this so that other young people, you know, whether they are living in Indonesia, whether they live in Ghana, whether they live in Chile, other young people will read the story and think seriously about the situation in the world. Now, you know, everybody has a kind of road to Damascus moment that they remember later in life. You know, you almost deconstructed, right? Later in life, you say, oh, that was my moment.

But I actually remember this conversation in my head. I remember feeling this deeply, which is why, for instance, I traveled to Beirut. I lived there for almost two years. Robert Fisk at the time was living in Beirut since dead, unfortunately. But I asked Fiski, you know, hey, listen, take me to this area of Sabra and Shatila because he was one of the first journalists to come into Sabra and Shatila in 1982. And Fisk took me in there. And I said, can we find that road where the bodies were lying, where this woman were, we walked around.

And, you know, I didn't have the photograph with me. I had a little picture on the internet. Couldn't really make out the exact road. But walking the streets with Fisk, it kind of redoubled my sense that, you know, the role of sensitive people who want to be journalists or writers, intellectuals of different kinds. our job is to really talk about these kind of things, these atrocities, and not just talk about them empirically. You know, hey, listen, here's an atrocity, there's an atrocity. The empirical thing actually demoralizes people, if you know what I mean, because then you get overwhelmed by an inflation of atrocity. You know, too many bad things happening.

It numbs you. It numbs you, exactly. Demoralizes you, numbs you, makes you desolate in a way. different range of emotions. You can either get completely numb or you get desolate. You feel almost useless. And so I learned over the years that it's not just an empirical act. Talk about that massacre, but try to understand why it happens in a historical process,

a social process, and how we can try our best desperately to create a world where things like that just don't happen anymore. You know, that kind of thing makes me heart sick till today. You know, if you don't feel when you are confronted with something ugly, you can't be an intellectual. Intellectuals shouldn't try to be dispassionate. I think it's a terrible piece of advice to tell young people, to be an intellectual, you should be dispassionate.

No, you should be deeply moved by things in the world. But don't let your emotions. create the story. Try to put your emotions into a theory. And I think that's what I would consider emotional maturity. When you're younger, you're just sort of angry, you know, intellectually angry even. And then some people tell you, no, no, you've got to control yourself. I think that's terrible.

I think take the anger and allow the anger to mature so that you understand how to explain to other people why terrible things happen, how you can act in the world to lessen the burden of terror against particularly vulnerable people. You've written a fantastic book, The Withdrawal, and you've covered the region of the Middle East.

And since you brought up Beirut, let's go to this place called Gaza, which you've been expressing your views on how how do you think this will all end up or pan out with what we've seen

since October 7th and you know what you have seen even before October 7 of 2023 what what do you think is the visual

of what's going to happen in the future I mean I'm really feeling a little more desolate about this than most things. You know, people used to talk about after the Oslo Accords of 1994, people talked about a two-state solution,

you know, that there'll be an Israel and there'll be a Palestine. And in fact, you know, that was, let's call it, settled international consensus. You know, everybody seemed to accept that. The United States, the Chinese, they all talk about the two-state solution. Some years ago, I was again in Beirut

and I was sitting in the office of Elias Khoury, who was the editor of the Journal of Palestinian Studies. Elias is a terrific novelist, writes great books in Arabic about the region and so on. So he's a man with a kind of fertile, imaginative outlook. I asked Elias, you know, how are things going, Palestine, this, that, and the other. And he said, he used a phrase for me, you know, when 1948 happened and the Palestinians were removed from what becomes Israel, It's another Lebanese intellectual, in this case, Constantine Zorayy, who comes up with the word Nakba. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic. And he defines what had happened to the Palestine in

1948 as the Nakba, the catastrophe. Well, I'm sitting with another Lebanese, Ilyas Khoury. It's about 2010, 2012, somewhere around then. Don't remember the exact date. A little more than 10 years ago. And Ilya says to me, look, what we have is not one Nakba in 1948. What we have is a permanent Nakba. In other words, on a permanent basis, the Israelis are interested in removing Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory, that is the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, but also from Israel proper. That's a policy, almost a stated policy.

That's what Alia said. And now, you know, we're hearing, Israeli officials talk about a second Nakba, the bulldozers moving from Gaza city, crossing Salhaddin Street, which divides Gaza into a north and a south, moving through Khan Eunice, perhaps all the way to Rafa. There is an almost directly stated and then practiced policy of removing the Palestinians from Gaza. Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu has said that directly. We're not going to live beside Hamas. For him, all Palestinians seem to be Hamas.

So we're entering a situation where we're going away from the two-state consensus to a no-state solution, where there will be no Palestinian state, where the Palestinians will be eradicated as a people, they will be sent into permanent exile and so on. That's what I fear is happening and might continue to happen. Now, it is also true. that tens, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world are sensitized to what's going on. You know, it's fascinating.

Why are there so many people upset about what's happening? I covered the war Operation Permanent Resolve 2014. Brutal bombing of Gaza. You know, previously there was Operation Cast led 2008. Brutal bombing of Gaza. There was no mass demonstrations around the world, you know. I mean, millions of people in the street in Indonesia. You know, what is bothering people?

It's not just Darul Islam, you know, that these are Muslims saying Muslims have been killed. I'm afraid that's not what's exactly driving a lot of people. What's driving a lot of people, in my opinion, is that this time the Israelis have demonstrated we don't care. We're going to kill 15, 20, 30,000 Palestinians. We're going to kill 10, 15, 20,000, Palestinian children. We're going to go into Janine in the West Bank with bulldozers. We don't care. We're going to call them human animals.

We're going to use words like that. It's the brazenness of the violence, the scale of the violence that has really upset tens, if not hundreds of millions of people around the planet. I mean, mass rolling demonstrations in the United States against what's going on. And nobody can control this. what's interesting. You know, in the West, there's an attempt to say, well, criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism, right? It's been a kind of now slogan been going on for a long time. President of the University of Pennsylvania had to resign from her position under pressure

from the U.S. Congress donors and so on, you know, who are claiming anti-Semitism. That's the character of the protests. People are not buying it. The protests are continuing because people, are saying, look, if you say that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism, that is itself making it very difficult to actually point out who the anti-Semites are. You know, let's be quite clear. There was no anti-Semitism in Asia. There was no anti-Semitism really in Africa, in Latin America, in the Arab world. For God's sake, when the Christians of Spain expelled the Jews from Spain in the

In 1492, the Spanish Jews, Sephardic Jews, went to Baghdad, went to Syria, came to my city of Calcutta. In fact, the family of Vidal Sassoon was in Calcutta. You know, in Calcutta, where I grew up in Christmas time, there's a very famous bakery called the Nahum's Bakery, Jewish bakery. These are Baghdadi Jews that came from Iraq. That's a fascinating place. Tells you a little about Asia. It's a Jewish-owned bakery. where all the bakers are Muslim and all the clients are pretty much Hindus.

And the greatest sale is of Christmas cakes, okay? It's classic Asia, you know, in a nutshell. And the owner being Jewish. And the owner is Jewish. The owner is Jewish, Mr. Nahum and now his family. Customers, Hindu. Anti-Semitism is a European problem. It's not an Asian, Arab.

African, Latin America. It's a European problem. Europe doesn't want to face up to its own problem. Now they are using that to attack critics of Israel. I mean, why would you call me an anti-Semite? I don't have any history of anti-Semitism. I don't have any family history of anti-Semitism. I abhor any kind of racism or anti-Semitism, but I also abhor what the Israeli state is doing. So their technique of trying to, you know, say that people criticize Israel anti-Syma, it's not working anymore. People are not having it. So we got a real contradiction, Gita, here, that you've got this terrible violence taking place, terrible, terrible violence. And at the same time, people are not buying the arguments for that violence.

I feel for Anthony Blinken and people like that, they have a very difficult brief. have a tough job. But unfortunately, we are coming off as rather immoral in all of this. Right. I want to ask you, in your view, has the Zionist ideology evolved from a few decades ago to what it is today? Or it's actually what it was meant to be from day one, what we're seeing in terms of how it's being manifested?

Because I don't think the true. tensions of the Zionist ideology at the beginning would have been for this to be as seemingly genocidal as we're seeing. It's very hard to say, you know, and I think we can do two things. One is, let's look at what Zionism has come to mean now. You know, what it has largely come to mean if it is, is, in a sense, linked to the state of Israel, is a state project that says that this is an ethnic religious state. You know, one of the tendencies in world history has been to move away from states being defined by ethnicity and by religion.

You know, we have taken very seriously, particularly after World War II, taken very seriously the idea of minority rights. This is a very serious and fraught issue. In India, for instance, it's a serious debate. This is not a Hindu state. India is not a Hindu state. It's a secular, in fact, socialist democratic republic. where minority rights must be upheld, the rights of not only Muslims, but Zoroastrians, atheists, all kinds of people, Buddhists and so on, Christians. The idea of minority rights has become

fundamental. In Indonesia, for instance, it's a fundamental issue. You know, there is a majority religion, but really also that majority religion is very complex. There are different strands of it. It's not homogeneous. But there is still room to make the argument. for the centrality of minority rights. Israel, in its manifestation now, has rejected the concept of minority rights and said there are one set of rights for Jews. Jews have, for instance, the right to return any time they want. And there's a second-class citizen opportunity for Palestinians, whose right to return, even though established by international law, UN Resolution 194, is set aside. So Israel right now is actually manifesting itself more and more as an ethno-religious state,

which is against the tide of world history, I'm afraid to say. And so Zionism has become effectively the ideology of an ethno-nationalist religious state project. Zionism is not merely the longing of the Jewish people for a place of safety. You know, it's in fact become for a Jewish state, which is very different. different than, let's say, you know, Jewish people need safety from European anti-Semitism. That has disappeared. That has evaporated. So one problem is this, is that Zionism has become this calcified form of ethno-religious nationalism. And calcified is not a word I'm using loosely. I mean it. There is a kind of calcification, a hardness that has come into this.

And that's one way to look at this. And I think an important way to look at, you know, and I think an important way to look The other way to look at something like Zionism is the contest within the international Jewish community. You know, from the time of Alexander Hurtzel onward, there's been a current within the Zionist community which says we don't want Israel. You know, the Jewish people are not about having a modern state like this. Jews have a relationship with God, with a messianic power. They don't need territory. This is a debate inside Judaism. You know, it's a debate where you have very serious rabbis taking a position against Israel, you know, saying we are actually against the idea of Israel.

Now, that's an interesting trend in Zionism because if you remember before 1948, there were a range of different religions in Palestine. They were Palestinian Christians, still a sizable population. They were Palestinian Muslims. And then there were Palestinian Jews, you know, who had lived alongside Christians, Armenians, Muslims for centuries. This strand of Palestinian Jew has been wiped out by this kind of calcified statecraft. There's no room now for these older kind of connections with people. So that older idea of Zionism as a relationship with the divine, with the Messiah, you know, with redemption. so on, that debate inside the Jewish community seems to be also withering away. And it's become

far more important to assert again fealty to that calcified, you know, religious national project. And for us, this is really a warning. You know, I'm saying this because it's not just about Israel. This is a debate in India, you know, should India be a Hindu state? I think it's a terrible idea. 12% more of the population are Muslims, for instance. There's hundreds of millions of people. You know, what are you going to do? You've got to create, you've got to maintain the integrity of the secular. In my opinion, there is no option right now for states with the kind of historical complexity that you and I are familiar with.

You know, Nahooms, Muslim bakers, Hindu clientele and so on. That complexity cannot afford. ethnic religious state. We cannot tolerate that. We need this other kind of state. And for people who don't know this, Israel and Palestine are part of Asia. They are on the Asian continent. What we saw for centuries in Jerusalem, not different than what we saw in Baghdad, not different than what we saw in Delhi, not different with what you saw in Jakarta, for instance. You know, I mean, Indonesia is interesting because it is an it is a, it is. a maritime world where there are linkages to the Hadrumat coast of Yemen, you know, the traders

that traded across the Indian Ocean. We are a complicated, ancient part of the world. We cannot afford some of these European fantasies of one people, one language, one religion, one this, one that. We know where that took Europe. It took it to Nazi Germany. We don't need that anymore. I want to ask you, I mean, what happened on October 7 was a tragedy, but I think people must also recognize what's happened cumulatively before then and thereafter is a bigger tragedy, right? How do you think with the political division that we're seeing in Israel right now? at the moment it's the people on the right that are governing and ruling, but we're sort of like sensing this division that's about to implode. Do you sense that this division and potential

implosion, God forbid, would that be a stronger excuse or reason for us to believe in the prospect of a two-state solution as opposed to what's been there in the past? I mean, the people from all over the world would have wanted to see a two-state solution. But we knew it was just a mission impossible, right, until recently. Intuitively, I'm just thinking that with what we're seeing internally within Israel, do you sense that there's probably a bigger hope right now? I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow, but is it a bigger hope today than maybe two months ago? Oh, I mean, you know. Or smaller hope, yeah. No, no, I really don't want to take away from you your first part of your question, the bigger hope part of the question.

You know, let's stay with that first. You know, I am hoping that at some point the Israeli population has an epiphany, that this road has no other, this road has no good solution. This is leading somewhere very ugly, already ugly, but it's going to somewhere, could be. be uglier, that this generation of Israelis may not want to tolerate something like that. I'm very much hoping that's on the table. Now, you know, what you said is true. October 7th, various Palestinian factions, including Hamas, cross the perimeter fence, attack the Israeli army, attack some kibbutz and so on.

Look, for all people like you and, you know, you and I, most people in the world, any child is attacked, that is an abomination, you know, always. That's a horrible thing. But many years ago, after the Operation Permanent Resolve, you know, I had returned from reporting in Gaza, an editor of mine said, will you put a book together, bring some key voices, particularly from the United States, Palestinian voices and so on, to basically talk about the war and the occupation, because there's just not enough public attention. So I approached a number of writers, you know, a lot of Palestinian poets, Arab poets.

And I made a book which I was very proud of. It's called Letters to Palestine. And it collects novelists like Teju Cole, the Nigerian novelist, a very fine writer. It collects Ben Ehren Reich, the journalist. It collects a range of terrific Palestinian poets that are very much, including Naomi Shibab. I really admire all of them. Anyway, in the introduction to the book, I wanted to go. into this exact dilemma. How do you deal with the question of violence in this setting?

And I came up with an image. I suggested that the Palestinians are a people lying down, and the Israelis have a pillow on their face, suffocating them to death. And the question to ask is, what is the human instinct? When you have a pillow on your face pushing down, what do you do as a human. You're going to push back. You're not going to just lie there and allow yourself to be suffocated to death. I mean, we don't need an experiment, right? We don't need to test this out. This, I think, is axiomatic that humans have a will to survive. When you're being suffocated, you'll fight back. What we saw on October 7th was exactly that. And it's also taken out of context because people should know that the Palestinians have tried a range of parts. For instance,

elections of 2006, people of Gaza in good faith went and voted for the Palestinian legislature. Now, they happened to vote for Hamas. They took a electoral road. The United States, the British and the Israelis said, we cannot accept Hamas. Well, if you're going to have an election, you should accept whoever wins the election. Are you saying that the election was fraudulent? No, they didn't actually say that. They said, we cannot accept Hamas governing in Gaza. Well, the people have have opted for Hamas, now you're saying, no, we're going to criminalize them. So they took out the parliamentary road, okay? The West and Israel said, this is not appropriate for you, this parliamentary road. Then, you know, Hamas tries all kinds of techniques, including armed

struggle. They get hammered for it, 2008, 2014, punctual regular attacks on Hamas for firing rockets and so on. Okay. Then some young people, I know. know many of them decided in 2019, we're going to do something new. We're going to nonviolently march to the perimeter fence. It's called a great march of return. And that's going to be our protest. Well, they did a nonviolent protest. They marched children included to the perimeter fence. The Israeli army snipers sat there and just fired at them, killing between two and 300 people. In cold blood, these are people marching nonviolently carrying flags and so on. Two to 300 people killed in cold blood. You don't allow them the parliamentary road. That's entirely denied.

You don't allow them the road of peaceful protests. And when they attack you, you say that's terrorism. So basically what you want is the Palestinian body to lie flat. You want to allow the Israelis to suffocate them. And the Palestinians should take that occupation, take that suffocation without complaining and just die. and that's the no-state solution. So, of course, nobody wants to see children impacted. You know, I've seen terrible violence against the children of Iraq. You know, that was horrendous. You know, you talk to young parents, they'll tell you, well, the most difficult thing is

at night, you know, if a car goes by, my child wakes up and, you know, I need to keep house clean and silent and no music and so on. Imagine raising a child in Iraq or Syria or, you know, Libya or indeed in Gaza with the kind of noise. There's two things about war zones that people don't get. They see the death. But what they don't get is the banality of the war zone. The noise is incredible.

The sound of bombat. Unbelievable. It's like multi-story buildings being brought down next to your ear every day. And secondly, what has become banal is the dust, the debris, the amount of toxic material. You know, because it's not. just the bomb. Modern things are built with toxic materials to build a building. You're using all kinds of toxic chemicals. When you bomb it at high heat, you release all this stuff into the air.

People are breathing in heavy metals. They're breathing in all kinds of ghastly things. This level of violence, you know, this has been going on against a Palestinian for a long time in Gaza. So yes, of course we don't want to see children impacted, civilians and so on. But It's a bit, I think, precious to say that, well, look, they're terrorists. When they try the parliamentary road, you say no. When they try the peaceful road, you say no. Then they try the armed struggle, which they are entitled to try by international law. And you say to them, you're terrorists.

I mean, I don't know what the Palestinians are supposed to do, frankly. So is there hope? I hope very much inside Israel that there are populations, majorities that are able to come up and say, We cannot tolerate this in our name. You know, we cannot tolerate this in our name. But I'm afraid there's very little evidence of that right now. Well, I've got some Jewish and Israeli friends who are concerned about how this is going to pan out. And I just sense that, you know, I think there could be a turn at some point.

I hope that were to happen. And I hope that were, you know, to be for the better. I want to switch to another place. This is the eastern part of Europe, Ukraine, right? And what is your take on what's happening there? And we in a developing world are struggling to put our heads around how, you know, there just seems to be no moral equivalents in the way, you know, well, the West or the United States and its allies are looking at, you know, two different situations, one in Ukraine and one in Israel.

Well, firstly, I want to say that I really enjoy conversations like this. And here's the reason why that most media around the world has become completely decontextualized, you know? Yeah. If I go on, say, MSNBC in the United States, the first question they'll ask me is, will you condemn Hamas, you know, and they go on and on and interrogate. fashion. And by the end of it, it's merely a kind of congressional inquiry and not a media, which is meant to elucidate, to try to explain, to try to understand things. I mean,

you and I may not agree on 100% of things, but we should be able to have a good conversation. I mean, I really, really want to, you know, appreciate what you're doing, which is having conversations with a bunch of people, long-form discussions and so on. You know, when we talk about Ukraine, you know, this is one of those issues where you can't have a short conversation. It can't be a 22nd clip. You know, what is your opinion of why don't you condemn Russia and so on, you know, for invading? Why do you have double standards? You invade, you condemn the United States for invading Ukraine. Why don't you condemn Russia? You know, this becomes that kind of thing, which is really more about my opinion than about my analysis. I'm more interested in the broader conversation of

trying to understand what's happening. So let's go in that direction. It's interesting that, of course, you know, this double standards is apparent to everybody in the world. Now, by now, a fraction of casualties in Ukraine compared to Gaza, fraction. You know, in fact, in such a short period, the loss of life in Gaza, the curve is here and Ukraine, it's somewhere here, you know, it's a fraction of the other thing is, I haven't been to Ukraine, but I've seen images of it, but I have, I was in Iraq in the early part of that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, the kind of bombing that the United States did in Iraq, what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, I'm not seeing that in Ukraine, you know, I'm not seeing, for instance, the Russians come in and just level Kiev. In fact, it's interesting, till today, you know, Vladimir Zelensky, president of Ukraine was in Buenos Aires for the inauguration of President Malay. It means, you know, Vladimir Zelensky can fly. Well, he's not having to drive across the border to Poland to fly.

He's flying from Kiev airport. That means the Russians haven't bombed Kiev airport. That's interesting. What kind of war are they fighting? Certainly not a war like the Israelis are fighting where there, firstly, is no airport any longer in Gaza. Used to be, you know. In 1956, Nehru flew out of Gaza to go to Beirut. That's another interesting story.

But there used to be an airport. There's none anymore. The Israelis anyway bomb every bit of infrastructure. In Iraq, the United States bombed all the infrastructure. You couldn't fly out of Baghdad airport till the U.S. had taken it back. You know, they bombed the runway. The Russians haven't bombed Kiev airport. They haven't bombed all the infrastructure.

They bombed some infrastructure, but not all of it and so on. They're fighting a bizarre war. One day we could talk about that. But it's not the same as the techniques of full spectrum dominance that's utilized now by the West, but also by the Israelis. Why did the Russians enter Ukraine? Because I think the reaction in the global South, which is not able to turn against Russia, has something to do with why the Russians entered in the Donbass region in Ukraine. You know, why is it that our countries aren't condemning Russia? You know, are they, do they have double standards?

I don't think so. I think they see this differently than how the West sees this. They have a different perspective. What's the perspective? It's interesting. When I talk to people in foreign ministries in South Africa, Namibia, India as well, it's interesting that they make a connection between Ukraine and Taiwan. They put these two together. I find that fascinating. Why are they doing that? Because the argument made is in 2018, United States defense strategy, if directly said that two of the near peer rivals of the United States are Russia and China, and that these people, these diplomats, see Ukraine and Taiwan as instruments to try to weaken, and this is a direct quote from Lloyd Austin, U.S. Secretary of Defense, weaken Russia, weaken China. Why is there need to weaken

Russia and weaken China. What's the problem? Is it, you know, authoritarianism? Doesn't seem to be that that's much of a problem. You know, the United States is quite happy to have all kinds of relations with authoritarian countries, Central African Republic and so on. That's not the problem. They're not worried about Xinjiang. I mean, whatever is happening in Xinjiang, it's certainly not as bad as the kind of Gulag archipelago created by the U.S. after 2001. I mean, the United States, being champions of Muslims around the world just makes me laugh, you know, what they did to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,

you know, what's happening in Guantanamo Bay, even now, Yemen, the destruction of Yemen. I can't tolerate that kind of level of propaganda. It just doesn't appeal to me. You know, I'm talking not about my intellect, talking about my sensibility. Can't take them seriously on that. Anyway, why?

What's bothering them? something interesting has been happening in Eurasia. You know, Europe was actually put in a difficult position by the United States. Three major wars by the U.S. really hurt the Europeans. And Norm and I talk about this in the withdrawal. One is the war against Iraq, the campaign against Iran, and the war against Libya, cut off Europe from three major energy sources. Libya was a prince.

oil supplier to Europe, sweet oil, the best quality, natural gas from Iran, key to Europe's energy future and so on. United States cut them off from these energy supplies. Increasingly, Europe started to rely on Russia. And so you had Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and then several other pipelines going through Poland and so on. There was reliance on Russia. There's a terrific moment when Donald Trump is talking to Jens Stortenberg of NATO and Trump berates him, you know, on camera and says to him, you know, listen, you want us to protect you. You want us to put all this money into NATO and so on. At the same time, you're buying all this energy from Russia. You want us to protect you from Russia and yet you're buying energy from them. We're not going

to tolerate this, you know, and so on. Very interesting that the U.S. was pushing hard on Europe to slow down on its integration with Russia. At the same time, Europe was increasing integration with China. This is for two reasons. Number one, China is a major manufacturer for European multinational corporations. You know, the city of Wuhan, where the pandemic was first noted, is actually a, it's a rural valley of Germany. The rural valley of Germany is moved from Germany to Hubei province in.

China, because a lot of German companies effectively operate out of Hubei. If you go to Wuhan, you see all these companies, German companies everywhere. So one is a lot of European manufacturing had been taking place in China. That's one integration. Secondly, European countries found that the net investment, FDI, foreign direct investment and country investment, the net country investment from the United States or from U.S. multinational corporations or from their own multinational corporations into their societies had been decreasing. That, you know, the Europeans are not able to harness their own multinational corporations to invest in Europe. They were investing in dot, dot, dot, places like Hubei province or in Indonesia. They are not investing

in their own countries. So these countries were facing a serious investment gap. including an infrastructure gap. The United States also was experiencing this, but they were able to get around that through military spending and so on. But Biden had to try desperately to push an investment and an infrastructure bill, because they can't compel U.S. multinationals

or U.S. capitalists to invest in their own country. Just can't do it. They're having a hard time. So Europe started increasingly to join China's Belt and Road project. You know, first one country, Italy, then a whole host of Eastern European countries and so on. What it seemed by 2018, 2019, was that there was now a kind of natural reintegration of Europe and Asia.

In a way, Eurasia was coming back together. What had blocked Eurasia? Firstly, the colonial history had blocked the proper integration. You know, integration where it's a win-win. It's not integration where India loses and Britain wins. but at a kind of, you know, sort of equitable level. Then the Cold War was a disruptor of this integration, you know, the iron curtain, the attempt to first isolate China and so on.

Now, all that is over. And for practical, pragmatic reasons, Eurasian integration was taking place. Now, this is a direct existential threat to U.S. multinational corporations and perhaps to the United States ruling elites. They cannot tolerate the return of China to the world stage. Cannot tolerate it. Why do I say return of China? Because until about the 1820s, China was one of the leading economies in the world.

It is now merely returning to where it was since the first opium war onward, the century of humiliation. And they can't tolerate Russia being a major player in Europe. They just can't tolerate it. Now, I'm no big fan of, you know, Russian oligarchs or whatever. I don't have any problem being critical of them. But if we look at it, it was this integration that seemed to bother the ruling elites. And then you got this new Cold War, poking at Russia through Ukraine, the basically emplacement of a U.S. ally in the government in Kiev after the Maidan protests.

And then this utilization of Taiwan, I mean, I think reckless move by U.S. Congress to twice send delegations to Taipei over the last year and a half. Very reckless move. What is the need of that? I mean, you know, you got to negotiate with Beijing. You can't, you know, basically set in motion what might end up being a military, you know, conflict at that end of the world. And I must say, the Chinese are being quite sober in this. They didn't take the bait with, you know, when U.S. two U.S. congressional delegations went to Taipei. What they did is after the U.S. delegation left, they closed down Taiwan airspace as an active force. Now, whether that's good or bad is not relevant, but at least they didn't shoot at the U.S. plane, you know, saying why are you there?

This is Chinese airspace. I mean, that would have been catastrophic. So, you know, we have a complicated situation of this polarity. You asked me before we started, why is it that the West has a hard time with unipolarity. The South seems to have an easier time. Yeah. Yeah, this is a good example of that, right? But do you think this is going to continue for a long time? You know, we're seeing the kind of difficulty that the United

States is faced with in trying to embrace this new multipolar world, whereas we in the global South are sort of like having in a much easier time, because we're kind of used to it, right? You know, we've been oppressed, we've been colonized, we've been graced by

Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity for a lot 2,000 years and we seem to be okay with it. Do you see the U.S. as being able to evolve to a place where they can actually embrace multipolarity in a much better way? I mean, you're asking me very fine questions about, you know, whether Israel can evolve and now the United States can evolve. You know, I see what you're playing at, and it's interesting. I'm with you. I'm with you. Obviously, one hopes that the United States attempts at least to shed

some of the illusions of its founding. For instance, this is the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine put in place in December 1823, which the United States, for 200 years, has effectively utilized as a license to do whatever they want in Latin America, including

the coup data 50 years ago against the government of Salvador Ayende in Chile. You know, brutal coup. not far from where, you know, I speak to you is the national stadium where the great singer Victor Hara was killed, you know, in late September. You are a guitarist. I dabble with the guitar solidarity with our brother Victor Hara, you know, murdered very brutally for singing beautiful songs. Songs that documented the lives of ordinary people. You know, people may not know this. So many of Victor Hara songs are songs about minors, about their lives.

It's about a worker going to work and saying, you know, think about me while I'm at work. Beautiful love songs of workers, you know, and a man like this was killed by that who, which was sanctioned, green lighted by Henry Kissinger, died recently, age 100. You know, Henry Kissinger is the blood of the Cambodian people on his head. You know, let's not forget that either. Okay. So the United States has these founding myths, manifest destiny, Monroe Doctrine, On top of all that, the city of the hill idea, you know, Jonathan Edwards idea, the city on the hill,

it's not a city on the hill. You know, the United States is just another country on the planet Earth. There's nothing special about the United States, you know. It had some glorious things happen in its history, but it doesn't make it or its people special. You know, the U.S. and Indonesia, I think roughly comparable population sizes, you know, comparable Almost. Almost, you know, but... 280 and 330. Yeah. Yeah, roughly comparable.

You know, what makes the U.S. think that it's better than Indonesia, for instance? Why should the Indonesian president have to defer to the U.S. president? You know, why don't they meet each other as equals, talk and think as equals? You know, why should, you know, our heads of government bow down to the U.S. leadership? You know, why should we do that? Why should we tolerate high officials of the United States basically, you know, being rude to our elected representatives? This happens all the time. You know, I don't even want to go into examples because there is this idea of superiority, the city on the hill.

Some of it is, you know, racism may be inherited from the past. But I don't think it's all in it's all racism. It also has to do with the civic religion of believing that the U.S. has a divine, position in the world. People within the USA say to immigrants, and I'm sure you've heard this, they say things like, you must be lucky, you are lucky to be here, you must be happy to be here, you know, things like that. Well, you know, I'm here accidentally or not here accidentally, but it's not like this country is any better than that country. You know, one of the first things is for the culture in the US to come to terms with the fact that the Chinese, for instance,

have a great civilization, not perfect. A lot of problems there. Of course, there are problems. If 1.4 billion people are able to create perfection, I would be surprised. They have a lot of internal problems. India, my God, even more problems. Indonesia, you have a lot of problems in Indonesia. None of us are perfect, you know.

But we're still people. And I think the core thing that prevents the United States is one, this belief that other countries simply cannot be trusted. They cannot, they don't have the same history. They can't govern with the same, you know, intelligence maybe. This idea that US leadership is necessary because other people are simply not trustworthy enough and so on. This definitely has to go.

And the second thing is that as if the US system is better than other systems, I mean, come off it. You can't tell me with a straight face that the US political system is better than other political systems. I mean, look at what. going to be the presidential election candidates next year. It's a reprise of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. I mean, if this so-called perfect system can keep only putting up people like that for the election,

it shows you that their bench is weak or their system doesn't allow for dynamic young people to emerge, you know, with new fresh ideas that are alive to the digital world and so on. I mean, you know, it's not a perfect system. There's so much money in the U.S. political system. There is the electoral college, which is an ancient barbaric form of holding back democracy. I mean, there's nothing better about the U.S. electoral system than the systems in India or Indonesia or anywhere. We all struggle to have better democracies. I mean, I'm sure you'd agree with me that democracy is a process.

It's not a system. You know, you can have the best voting system. That's not democracy. Democracy is the project. It's the process. It's getting, you know, poor people in a slum in Jakarta or in Calcutta to feel that they mean something, that they can confidently go out there and work for a candidate or that they can themselves stand up and say, you know, I'm from a poor family. I come from a slum. I want to represent you because I feel confident.

Well, wow, when we get more of that kind of evidence, we will say, wow, our democracy has matured. Democracy doesn't mature when you get the most expensive voting system. Democracy is in the head. It's not in the machine. And in that sense, the U.S. has to get over this thing that, you know, they have the best system, the best this, the best that. I don't think that's true now.

and maybe, although I haven't looked at it, maybe it's not been true for a long time. I'm in a camp that believes that democracy cannot just be defined by way of the distribution of power to the hands of many. It's got to be defined also by way of its distribution of public goods to the many, right? I mean, whether it's health care, welfare, intellect, social value, moral value. I think those ought to be taken into consideration. I want to push on something that you alluded to separately in a different context. With respect to how much military spending the United States is undertaking, together with its allies, it amounts to a little over $2 trillion on a yearly basis

compared to the total military slash defense budget of the world, which amounts to about 2.7, 2.8. It's a staggering, you know, number and a staggering observation. Does that, you know, correlate with, you know, the kind of peace and stability that we would like to usher in the future? Well, that number, 2.15 trillion of U.S. spending, comes from a really good analysis. done by Global South Initiative, with whom Tri-Continental is working closely to build a major study we'll release in January. We're going to release two studies, a dossier called the churning of the world order, which is fascinating because here we try to analytically show what is the global north,

what is the global south. We're thinking of the global north as a block, the kind of NATO plus countries. The global south is a set of groupings. they're far more disparate. They're not organized into any kind of political order. There are some groupings, G77 and so on, but these are not like NATO plus, the G7. These operate as a block. The Global South is far more disparate.

So that's one text. And the second text is on a kind of hyper-imperialism, where our colleagues at Global South initiative have looked at the amounts of military spending that are not counted by the Stockholm Institute, which is basically the gold standard of looking at military spending, because they looked at also nuclear military spending and so on. You know, what they found is 75%, three quarters of global military spending last year was spent by the NATO countries. United States, by far the largest share of that, but three quarters of global military spending spent by the NATO countries. China spends 12% of global military spending. That's quite a,

you know, that's quite a variance, 12%. I mean, this idea that China is a major threat to the planet, I think it's helpful to look at these numbers. We also have in this text a long section on military bases. Also helpful because it talks about the reach. You know, I mean, It is now axiomatic, not just to people like you and I that follow these things closely, but it's axiomatic to most people. That is the United States that has bases in Okinawa, U.S. has bases in northern Australia, where in fact they can house nuclear weapons in violation of the Treaty of Raratonga, which is the treaty that says it's a nuclear-free zone, you know, the whole South Pacific and so on.

You know, there's no Chinese base in, I don't know, in Mexico. The United States tried, at least the right-wing politicians to say that China is building a base in Cuba. Journalist friends of mine went to the town where they made this allegation. It's fascinating. People said, well, we don't know anything about a Chinese base, but we do know that in the next street over lives a Chinese family. You know, they do this, this and that business. but they've been here for 150 years. And oh, yeah, I think there's another guy,

the other end of town who's also Chinese, but I think he comes from a family, been here 300 years, you know. I mean, it's a really interesting attempt by the US to say, oh, look, we have bases there around China, but China has a base in Cuba. There's no base in Cuba. You know, I also visited that area.

There's no sign of any Chinese base. I asked the Chinese ambassador to Cuba, Mahui, very nice, engaging person, intellectual. They don't have any interest in militarizing the Caribbean. That's not their game. They keep talking about win-win relations. They want win-win relations with the United States. They don't want lose-lose relations.

You go to war, that's the definition of lose-lose. Win-win is more trade, more human contact and so on. So in that sense, this military spending, it's beyond obscene. I don't even know what to say. You know, many years ago, I mean, 100 years ago, next year, Mahatma Gandhi, 1925 gives a speech in Empir, beautiful speech. And what Gandhi said in that, which he had one line, which I think is powerful. He says, the test of civilization of a nation is the absence of starvation among its people. Now, that's a test of civilization.

The test of civilization of a people isn't your military budget. And I say this because, you know, I want to say that the way we judge a society, a government, isn't by its constitution. Because I think that's a category error. You can say anything in a constitution. You know, if I go and read the constitution of Malaysia for it, I bet it's a great constitution, you know, blah, blah, blah, we're going to do this. Indian constitution is amazing. We're going to eradicate this, that, and the other. No, no, no, don't look at a constitution to judge a government or a process.

Look at the budget. The budget is a better place to judge the values of a country. Because how you spend your resources tells you more about your priorities than your constitution, you know? And so in the US budget, in the US budget in many of these NATO countries, they spend far in excess on military and so little. on education, health care, eradication of poverty, eradication of starvation. Gandhi's test should be the test for every politician. If I was to run a debate of political candidates for high office

in any country, I would say to them, how would you react to this statement by Gandhi? The test of civilization of your government is at the end of your term, the absence of starvation in your population. Would you meet that standard? And I would like to see what they, answer because the answer isn't, of course, we'll meet that standard. The answer is data. It's not your morals. Will you be able to say we've eradicated poverty? What did you do in your budget to eradicate poverty? Simple as that. So this military spending beyond obscene. You know, it's mind-boggling that they occupy, you know, to global north, as you aptly pointed out, 75% of the total global military spending. But I just don't think it's sustainable on the basis of the following.

If you take a look at the budget of the United States government, right now, the interest that they need to surface on a yearly basis is already in excess of the military spending requirement. Right. You know, at the rate that interest rate has gone up and at the rate that it's going to stay up, you know, at a relatively high level, I just don't think. they're going to be able to sustain this budgetarily, which means that there is hope, that there could be some inflection. I don't want to get a little too much into this conspiracy about the military industrial complex and all that good stuff. But at the end of the day,

if you see a block of countries that occupy 75% of the military spending of the world, I'm not sure if that's going to vote well for peace and stability in the future, right? I'm just hopeful for some sort of structural inhibition, you know, by way of a budgetary consideration or something else. The other point that you had alluded to earlier would have been how the United States is spending close to a trillion dollars a year, vis-a-vis the United Nations, which is only on a budget of $3 billion U.S. it's mind-boggling. You know, how you're expecting this multilateral institution to try to basically prevent everybody from going to war with each other when you have one giant that's spending close to a trillion dollars.

So talk about that. Well, the first thing is, let's think about military spending. You know, for decades, for the United States, military spending was a good thing. Why? You know, from Lord John Maynard Keynes, we learned that capitalist economies work in cycles. You know, the Soviet economist, Condratief, had mapped out these Conduct F waves. There was an upswing in the economy. You know, things heat up, competition increases, then there's a crisis.

You get a down swing. And then you need counter-cyclical spending. That's what Kane said. Because Kane said, if you don't have spending against the cycle, then you're going to get deeper and deeper depressions. So governments have an obligation to do countercyclical spending. At a downturn, which is a normal process in a capitalist system, you've got to spend against the downturn and try to push it up as quickly as possible.

That's called counter-cyclical spending. In most countries in the world, counter-cyclical spending is done on the social side. So that, for instance, let's take the Nordic countries. For decades, they, in a time of when they detect downturn, Increased spending on education, hire more teachers or do more things, you know, build, maintain the schools, get the roof repaired and so on. They did it on healthcare, add a new wing to the hospital, get new machines and so on. Counter-cyclical spending was done socially, build a better bus system, whatever. In the United States, interestingly, there's almost a direct thought process that occurs.

And I'm going to lay it out. They said, look, if we do all this, it's socialism. If we create good public transportation, good public schools, good public health systems, we can't do that. So, the United States did what is called military Keynesianism. At a time of the downturn, they had to spend, you know, in order to prevent the drip to have a lift. And what is they spend on the military. And fascinating, if you go on to a U.S. military base, it is, in fact, like a northern European society.

The buses are free. You know, the health care is really pretty good. the education system, the classrooms aren't falling apart. They spent a lot of money on the military on bases, on weapons systems and so on. They subsidize an enormous amount of their high-tech industry. I mean, the reason the U.S. came up with all these incredible high-tech inventions, including the Internet, is because of military spending. At that time, it was really beneficial for the United States in aggregate,

not for the people because their services were deteriorating. you know, poor health care has been a problem in the U.S. for decades. And they could have, other than spend $2 trillion on military, they could have spent half a trillion, $500 billion on the health care system and improved it beyond belief, you know, and so on. So that's one thing to understand. Secondly, as a consequence of this military Keynesianism, you actually have to borrow from somebody, you know, in the end of the day.

The United States was lucky. they had what is known as dollar seniority, the seniorism being the term for medieval Europe, the barons of the dollar, you know, the dollar lordship, where the dollar, especially after 1971, after Nixon pulls the dollar off the gold standard, the dollar becomes the effective international currency. And most trade at the time took place in dollars, even now, about 50% of international trade takes place in dollars. There hasn't been a precipitous decline in dollars. It's about little more than 50% trade in dollars.

So, the United States is able to export its problem by importing dollars from elsewhere. I was interested to see this year, Indonesian government said that about 30% of profits have to be maintained, of dollar profits have to be maintained in Indonesia. Now, that's an interesting move because that's one out of hundreds of moves made by countries in the global south trying to break away from this system of feudal relations with the dollar, where they feel obliged to basically underwrite the U.S. system. We see this between West Africa and France. France uses the euro, but West African countries were forced to use the French rank until now.

And also to maintain their assets in the French central bank. Incredible. that this was being done by Burkina Faso, Mali and so on, all these coups that took place in Central Africa and the Sahel region, all these coups were in a way against the French franc as well, also against France in general, but the Frank in particular, saying, you know, we can't afford to keep underwriting your currency, your wealth. What about us building our wealth out of our resources?

United States is facing this as a problem. We call this de-dollarization. And I'm afraid on the internet, there's a little too much excitement about it. But de-dollarization doesn't happen like this. It's going to be a very protracted, slow process. And the reason is no other currency right now. I'm speaking quite frankly, because look, it's not like I'm not looking forward to the demise of the dollar system because I am. But I'm also a practical person who understands reality.

I'm not caught by the fevers of the internet. The problem is that China, perhaps either the world's largest or second largest economy, depending on if you look at PPP or not, purchasing power parity, China will not actually allow its currency to become the global currency. Because as far as our systems work now for that to happen, the Chinese government will have to have full convertibility of the currency. You'd have to allow foreign nationals to buy assets, in China. There's no other way to make the renminbi into the global currency in the system

we have now. And the Chinese government are not going to permit full capital convertibility, currency convertibility. They're just not going to go down that road. They've seen what happened firsthand during the Asian financial crisis. You remember, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, you know, racked by that tsunami of the collapse of currencies. are going to allow it. So because the Chinese are not going to do it, and nobody else really is able to provide currency like the United States, the only alternative is going to be some kind of basket of currencies. And right now, to be quite honest with you, the proposals are in COVID. They don't really make sense to me. I mean, who's going to decide on the basket? Who's going

to underwrite the basket? You know, I mean, will the Chinese Central Bank or the People's Bank of China really come in and provide liquidity. They're not providing liquidity to the Bricks bank at the levels that they should, you know, are the new developer bank based in Shanghai. I just don't see it. I think there's, again, this sort of fever of the internet. But the trend lines are clear what Indonesia has done, saying, look, we don't want all the dollars to be moving out. Other countries, Malaysia, you remember, Martin Muhammad pushed out for capital controls. these are all indicators over the last 25-odd years of a kind of shift. There's no good public policy right now on the table to take us to a multipolar economic system.

You know, people like Joma Sundaram in Malaysia and others have been trying to think of these issues as seriously as possible. But we don't have the boat yet. You know, we're still living on a sinking ship called the dollar. one or two rafts in the water that people are scrabbling to hold on to, but you can't build a complex world economy on rafts. You need another boat. We just don't have it in sight right now. There's definitely aspiration on many, if not most of the global south, but there's no realism. And one way to look at it is if you take a look at the global liquidity, right, there's more than $100 trillion worth of liquidity.

Most of that is sitting in the G7 countries. And the biggest chunk of that is sitting in the United States, right? At that rate, it's going to be, it's going to take a long time for the global south to basically compete, much less D dollar rise completely, right? Or significantly, or in a meaningful manner. Then you take a look at the liquidity that's within the global south, it's, also very limited. Then I think you've got structural issues here. Aspirationally, I think we can, I'm with you. Well, we shouldn't get too excited about what's in the internet, you know,

with regards to the de-dollarization and all that stuff. But there is the reality of limited liquidity in Global South. And I think we've got to take it, you know, incrementally, you know, one step at a time. You know, it's interesting what you say. I mean, I think, you and I are on, we are a complete agreement on this because the way you formulated it is really important. And for people who did pick this up, I'm going to sort of get us playing you a little bit if you don't mind. Because what you said was that there is a structural problem. That's the phrase you use. There's a structural problem. Well, that's interesting. out of that $100 trillion of liquidity, about $32 trillion are in tax havens,

which, by the way, most countries in the world add an adjective to them. Illicit tax havens. These are not legal instruments, including the city of London, by the way. They're not just, you know, Liextonstein and this, that, and the other, Cayman Islands, Panama. The city of London is the largest illicit tax haven. that we have, you know. By the way, the city of London isn't London. It's actually a place in London called the city of London,

which is the financial, it's like the Wall Street, etc. Sure. That's one-third of global liquidity is sitting in tax savings outside the jurisdiction of governments. That's an, for me and in our institute, we play with this number a lot, because that's incredible. One third of the money that could be in motion is basically frozen in these havens, you know, doing all kinds of unregulated activities. You know, it's the dark web of money. We don't know what they are doing.

I mean, I suspect a lot of it isn't drugs and weapons and, you know, human trafficking. Of course not. But we don't know. We just don't know because it's out of the control of international regulators. And all these processes, you know, Basil 2 and all these discussions in the UN about how to better manage the world finances and so on, they've all come to naught because they really don't have a compelling project behind them. The last time we in the third world had a compelling project to discuss these structural issues was in a sense the 1950s and 60s when the UN Conference on Trade and Development was created. by people like Raul Prebich in 1964. Uncad, you know, at the time, came with a project.

I mean, they talked about reversing the terms of trade. You know, that book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, whatever one thinks of it, the section on Indonesia is fascinating. Because he describes Thaisley. It's crazy. It's crazy. The World Bank comes in, says you're going to build a power plant.

You have to finance the power plant. we'll give you some concessionary financing to start with, but the Indonesian people will be on the hook for the money. But by the way, don't build such a small power plant which you need. Build a giant power plant for future needs, which means that for X number of period of years, you can't run this power plant at capacity, which means it's running at a loss, which means you can't pay off the wealthy bondholders, which means you go into catastrophic debt. I mean, that structural problem of that period was well identified by UNTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and the policy proposals to get through it. Today, Angtad has been wildly underfunded.

It is a pale shadow of what it was. And I say this with a broken heart, because I work often with economists from UNCTAD, a very close relationships with people like, you know, Kozal Smith, Richard Kozol, right? you know, he's the lead economist in one of the divisions there. My friend Raja Khalidi used to work there and so on. It's terrific history, but deeply underfunded and they don't have the ability to drive a project. They're dealing with this small issue, that small issue, tax reform here and so on. The broad project, we just don't have it right now. You know, the countries of the global south, whether it's in Bricks, the Bricks 11,

or it's in the G20, the southern countries and so on. They just don't have a project that's uniting them. But I think it's going to appear. And here the objective conditions are correct for a new project, as you said. You know, there are structural issues. There's that feeling that people have. But the subjective lack is there. And I want to say this quite forcefully.

And I don't mean to be rude. What do I mean by subjective lack? I think in our countries, the seriousness of purpose, the intellectual seriousness of purpose is lacking. You know, too many of our governments are taking advice from McKinsey, taking advice from the IMF, taking advice from other people. We're not spending enough to build the intellectual capacity of our own people.

You know, what has happened to the very fine finance ministries in the Asian countries? You know, where are those finance ministers that one admired, you know? You mentioned, talked about Singapore earlier. Singapore at one time had a superb and such a kindy place, superb people entering government. You know, I may not have agreed with Raja Rathnam on many things. You know, Raja Rathnam was a foreign minister. We would have disagreed on a lot of things.

But there is no doubt that Mr. Raja Rathnam was one of the most interesting people, curious, right, and so on, able to push an agenda. where are the Raja Ratnam's of today? You know, Sri Lanka used to produce high quality people with a project in mind, economists, Lala Jaya Wadena, who then became the rector of the UN university. Where is the Lail Jaya Vada of today? Some of this is the outcome of the defunding of our education systems during the kind of high period of neoliberalism in the 1990s,

inclusive of Indonesia, you know, great, intellectual capacity, where has it gone? So because we have kind of eviscerated our intellectual capacity, we are now basically on the phone with McKinsey, asking McKinsey to give us a hand. What does McKinsey know about our own plight? They are basically cookie cutter approach to the world. You know, when you read one McKinsey report, you read them all. You know, you need somebody who comes in and provides serious deliberation and thought. And I'm going to leave you with this. When I wrote the book, the poorer nations,

I spent about a long period of time studying seriously the archive of the South Commission, impaneled by Tanzania's former president, Julius Nyerere, General Secretary was the former Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. In the 1980s, they met for long periods of time to discuss the debt crisis and what's the future going to be for the global South. And they produced a report, which I think is very good, called the challenge of the South. Very good report.

In my, the poorer nations, I go into this in great detail. Today, who is going to have the intellectual and political capital to call for South Commission number two, to impanel group of serious people who are going to look at some of the challenges, maybe 20 people, spend a year meeting regularly. and then coming up with a set of policy proposals, not to have discrete proposals, but to provide a vision. What is the way forward? What would Asian regional integration, for instance, look like? You could simply impanel a Asian regional integration commission to think about what would it look like.

You know, what would it look like if India and China were able to solve the border dispute? you know, what would it look like if the countries around China could have a way of, you know, better communicating with China about their anxieties, you know, Vietnam and others about various islands and so how do we close down these conflicts and focus attention on the development issues that seem to be driving most of these countries and have a vision for that. Today, I'm saying this again with a heavy heart. I don't see the necessary intellectual capacity in our societies at the highest level to think these through, which is why we may not be colonized in all respects, but we are still colonized

by McKinsey, by the international monetary funds, staff meetings, and so on. Wow. You know, this is very structural in a sense that it's going to be a struggle. for quite a while for the Global South to find the right meeting point between talent and power, both for the governance and the leadership levels, right?

Now, what, you've mentioned this in the past about how the Global South ought to get rid of violence, corruption, and being debt-ridden, right?

Those are sort of like the general recipes for the Global South. to be able to be at the top. On top of that, you've got that basic human capital development issue, right, in terms of the ability or the difficulty of finding the right point between talent and power. How can we be optimistic, you know, for the global sound to thrive? In addition to the fact that there's not enough liquidity, okay? I mean, it's, you know, we can be.

symbolic. We can be the conscience to the world in terms of how humanity ought to be pushed forward. We can be quite loud, but we're not going to be as loud as we want to be. If we're not getting ourselves to the level or the educational attainment level as we want ourselves to be at, and we want to be able to get out of this debt, you know, entrapment. what's what's where where's the optimism then with respect to the global south yeah i mean look you mentioned three aspects that drags you know corruption debt and you know i mean violence i think we've gotten rid off i mean we've been a lot more yeah yeah i mean i would say less violence and more political disagreement you know like these border political neurosis yeah you're

Right. Some political problems or the other, you know. Liquidity is not a problem because we have wealth. We just don't have capital liquidity. You know, we just got to know how to monetize it. Yeah. Exactly. Also know how to maintain your own resources, you know. I mean, it's it's strange that 100 years later, the question of resource sovereignty is still on the table. You know, I mean, why is it, for instance, that in our. part of the world, the big mining companies are Australian, Canadian, and so on, you know, why aren't we better able to harness our own resources and not leaps the profits abroad? You know, why aren't we able to do that?

I ask, when I go to countries around the world, I always ask people, hey, listen, why do we import toothpaste? I mean, for God's sake, toothpaste is not so complicated. In fact, if you have your own toothpaste ambition, you're going to build a chemical industry. You're going to have to build fluoride somewhere and so on. And I'm not saying that every country should make toothpaste. But why is it that only a few multinational corporations sell the whole world toothpaste? Why don't we have a Southern African toothpaste company and so on?

You know, where is our ambition? It's also good for the planet. You know, why should we be importing things from so far away? Biscuits, for instance, you know, why can't you have a domestic biscuit manufacturer? I mean, for God's sake, every household in the global south, if they have an oven, knows how to make a biscuit. And you don't even need an oven for it. You know, in India, biscuits, there are non-oven-made biscuits. Why are we importing biscuits, you know?

Why do we import pasta? Why are we even eating pasta, frankly? you know, it's ridiculous. It's expensive. It's not nutritionist and so on. So some of it has to do with harnessing resources. I reached behind when you were talking because I wanted to bring these books out. I'm rereading Sayyad Hussein Alatas' books on corruption.

You know, I don't know if you know as well. Sayyad Hussein Alatas was a Malaysian sociologist, wrote a terrific book called the myth of the lazy natives. You know, it's a book that inspired Edward Saeed, in fact. Alatah basically argues in these books that, you know, corruption isn't the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. You know, let's take the case of India.

When we kick the British out, literacy rate was merely 12.2%. I know. I know. And then I was listening to this. Oh, man. It's amazing. And then you have to build a state, a complex state, structure. So you give somebody a uniform, you know, they effectively come from a rural area.

You give them a uniform. They come from near poverty and starvation and you give them power and their salaries are not very good. You're baking corruption into the cake. You know, in all post-colonial countries, we had this level of petty corruption. But all the focus is on this. The focus is not on the other corruption. We are doing a project now, looking at transfer pricing. You know, how major corporations come into a country and they don't pay tax in that jurisdiction, they effectively transfer out the profits and pay tax elsewhere or don't pay tax at all. In fact, don't pay tax.

Part of this dispute globally now between the United Nations and the OECD is around who should devise the global tax code, you know, this pillar two thing that is coming into, into effect in January. You know, Pillar 2 actually is interesting because it comes into effect with a range of safe harbors. These safe harbors are great

because they are going to make a $200 billion for top accountancy firms move their revenues to $300 billion. I mean, Deloitte made $60 billion this year. The more of these kind of rules that you create which have safe harbors, allows global accountancy firms to take all big multinationals into the safe harbor.

So the rule is vitiated before it comes into effect. When I saw Deloitte made $60 billion this year, I was laughing. And I thought, okay, man, you know, 60 billion, you know, it's an accounting firm. Next year they'll be at $120 billion, you know. And I saw this because I looked at the Deloitte site and they had a FAQ for potential multinationals who wanted to circumvent pillar two. They're ready. They're open for business to help you circumvent the OECD laws. Okay. So that level of corruption, institutionalized transnational corruption, simply not in our gaze, you know, and Saizuzen al-Ailatas points that out. It's very important for our countries.

You know, in fact, if we could have better regulation of multinational corporations, transnational companies, if we could have better banking regulations, you know, if Basil two or now hopefully a Basel 3 comes into play. You know, we want, for instance, hot money to no longer prey upon small countries, you know, where banks come in to take advantage of the arbitrage of interest rates and so on. Very simple way in which you can leverage with volume. That's all you need. You don't need intelligence.

You see some variance in the interest rate. You bring your volume in. You take advantage. You destroy a country's, you know, currency, effectively. the quacha in Zambia is prey to this stuff, you know. So, because variances are often high, it's a copper producing country. So what I feel is there are so many instruments before us, so many, you know, necessary, regulatory things we need to return to.

And by the way, it's not like we're returning to something or we're producing something super onerous. We're merely returning to things that were there in the 50s and 40s. you know, basic banking regulations, basic requirements for banks to have some capital requirements. You know, I mean, what is your leverage that you're allowed to use? Because your lack of leverage limits allows you to generate volumes to take advantage of variances in our countries where the banks simply don't have the capacity to generate that leverage. You know, they can't afford to do it.

You know, they have much smaller volumes. if they make a mistake and they lose, they're finished. And especially state banks can't afford to do this. So this is hugely unfair. These are structural things, but already in five, six minutes, you know, in our conversation, there are some proposals of how to undermine these things. You know, we need a Basel 3. We need the UN to produce a tax code.

And we need to return to the 1970s discussion in the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations for a code of conduct. We don't have a code of conduct, you know, how you should be allowed to behave. I am very, very much opposed to transfer pricing, very much opposed to this non-jurisdiction taxation where you're allowed to remit taxes. I mean, look at what companies do. These are mainly Canadian, Australian companies do with countries like Zambia. They buy copper inside Zambia for, let's say, $100 a ton.

When the truck crosses the border to Uganda, it's supposed to. already $150 a ton. How did merely crossing the border increase the price? Then by the time it gets to the port, it's about 200. By the time it gets to China, it's 280. By the time the Chinese produce it into whatever you need in your thing, you know, the cost of the copper inside the iPhone and so on is way higher than $100 a ton. You don't have to go to Zambia, man.

You don't have to go to Zambia. You just go to Indonesia to see that. Hey, we've spent more than 97 minutes talking. You know, I'm conscious of time. I could talk to you for hours, man, but I hope you don't mind. I'm going to ask you the last question and feel for you to spend as many minutes as you want on this.

And this is about a place that you've spent a lot of time in called Africa. This is a geography that occupies an area, bigger than China, the United States, India, and Canada combined, right? Where do you think Africa is going to be in terms of the role it's going to be playing in the global South context, right? I mean, this is an area that has more than 500 million square miles of arable land, bigger than that of Mexico, bigger than the whole of Mexico. And it's going to have a population of two to three billion in no time.

time, right? I just think that, you know, intuitively, this is going to be an economic giant, inevitably. How do you think Africa is going to play a role in the global South and with respect to the rest of the world? Well, you know, when we talk about something like this, we always have to start with 1884, you know, in Berlin, when the Western powers carved up Africa. And that attitude of treating Africa as a resource has not really gone away. This contest that the United States is trying to impose against the Chinese in Africa as part of this. I mean, you know, I've visited many Chinese businesses and public, you know, entities operating in China. And, you know, they are operating there for profit, especially the private businesses.

But I don't see them out there with guns and with, you know, military bases and so on. They are entering into these countries and saying, hey, listen, I want to do a deal with you. The United States can't outbid these Chinese businesses, so they walk in and say, we've got to get them out through any means necessary. I mean, it's a really ugly situation. Africa, the African continent has become frontline in this Cold War between China and the United States. It's really an ugly situation. On the other hand, lots of positive developments that I also want to put on the table. What we saw in the Sahel is fascinating.

Koo after coup getting rid of the French. Not a big fan of military coups, but, you know, again, what are the options? I'm just going to give you the example of Mali and let Mali speak for the whole continent, because it's a good example, actually. In the 1990s, I interviewed Alpha Omar Konare, who was the head of government in Mali. Very interesting man. Comes from the left, but by the 1990s, you know, Omar had basically said, look, you know, socialism is not on my agenda.

my agenda is there to develop Mali. He had come to that view. Now, he may not agree with him, but that's a very sensible view. He's a head of government in Mali, won a democratic election and so on. He turned to the United States and he said, look, I have some problems I need to deal with.

In the northern part of Mali, I have a Turek rebellion. The Berber rebellion has been going on for a lot of long time. These are the Amarig people of the Atlas Mountains in the north. Secondly, he said, I have a problem in the middle belt of Mali, where the sedentary population, the Fulani and the sedentary, you know, there is a contest between herders and the sedentary. I need to fix that problem. But the overarching problem, and then there's infrastructure problems in Bamako and so on, Timbuktu, I need to fix some things. But these are the two main conflicts I want to settle.

But I have an overarching problem. I've inherited a massive debt from a military dictatorship that came before that was backed by you guys, the West. So what I would like is I would like a massive haircut on the debt burden and I would like a complete restructuring of whatever remains underneath the haircut. Again, completely rational thing to do. You don't need to be a person of the right, center, left, whatever. You're faced with this issue. He analyzed it very clearly. And he said, if I can get the debt burden off with Mali's sale of gold, with increased tourism and so on, I can figure out the solution to this.

Intract what looked like intractable problems. Okay. United States immediately said, sorry, no haircut, no restructuring. Why? Because they said it's a moral problem. You know, this will create moral ambiguity to other borrowers. That was the statement. The State Department's Africa division basically told Omar Konare,

you can go back home and do your best pal. We're not going to do anymore. So he couldn't solve the issue of the Amazeg in the north, couldn't deal with the herder-pulani problem in the center and couldn't upgrade infrastructure in the principal cities of Mali. And therefore, he got out of office. You see, in 2011, when the... United States and France basically went and collapsed the Libyan state. Al-Qaeda forces that had been

brought to Libya, often by the United States from Turkey, the so-called ratline. These fellows went down into Mali. And they made an alliance with the Amazeg, with the Berber communities of the north. And they came down in an incredible force and took over, you know, Timbuktu, came all the way down into Gao and so on, just almost came into the main cities of the south. It was remarkable, the speed at which they moved. Why? Because they took advantage of all these things in the center,

the fight between the herders and the settle. They picked aside, got allies and so on. And the Malian military couldn't deal with this, because again, they are underfunded, they don't have a good project and so on. And then the French arrived, Operation Barcane, and say, okay, we'll come in and fight Al-Qaeda. Of course, that made a mess of things

because they turned the whole population against the French now. And then there was sympathy for some of the Al-Qaeda forces, by the way, may not be easy to understand, but that's exactly what happened. There was no option for young people, born in the 1990s, born in the 2000s, who are now 20-odd years old, you know,

no option. Many of them, lower-middle class rural backgrounds joined the military. It's these young people that went back inspired by early histories of radicalism in their country, of nationalism and so on, and conducted these coups trying to find a project for their country. They don't have a project now, but they know what they don't like. They want Mali's national interest to be first. They want to look across the border to their brothers and sisters in Burkina Faso, in Niger, in Guinea, and they want a common project. Now, this is actually a great indicator of the mood not only in the Sahel, but in Africa and

in Asia and in Latin America. In other words, billions of people around the world are saying we want to put our interests first, not the interests of the Western wealthy bondholders first and our interests second. And this maybe sounds like, oh, that's a bit sophisticated for somebody. I think you're underestimating people if you believe that because it's interesting how people directly tell you in small towns that we need to be first here. We don't want to be second after people who we borrowed from and so on. What we?

We haven't borrowed from anybody. It was corrupt governments packed by external forces. So we want to put our interests first. Now, as I said earlier, the problem in a lot of these countries, in, you know, the ones I name Mali Burkina Faso, is that many of these people come from the military. They don't have a broad sense of history, economics, sociology, and so on. They don't understand how to build a project. Alpha Omar Konare comes from the left movement. You know, the left movement for a lot of African people was like a school.

You know, you read about history, you read about economics, you read. you read about your own countries. You, in that school, developed a broad theory of the march of history. You know, it's pretty interesting how that generation, our generation also, had a broad thing. But these young people, they came up in places where the schools were destroyed by lack of funding. The universities were eviscerated. They joined the military. They learned about military science, but they don't have a broad understanding of the world.

You can't change the world unless you have a broad humanistic perspective toward the world. So I'm afraid, again, returning to our earlier thing, that there is an urge in the global South to change things. There simply isn't that project people can gather around. Yeah. Wow. I'm a believer of serendipity, though, in the absence of systemic or systematic approach of cultivating leadership or good systems or whatever. There's there's always that hope for some sort of serendipitous moments, which would entail, you know, positive inflection points. Vijay, I could talk to you for hours, man. It's, it's fascinating. I want to, I want to thank you

for the time. It's my pleasure. Maybe you and I should create that South Commission and we can chat more often. How often do you travel? I mean, to the U.S. or to Asia? I travel a lot, and I'm sure we'll find a moment when our

paths cross, and then we can meet in person. I hope so. I hope so. I'm really looking forward to seeing in person. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Take care. Yes. Enjoyed it. Bye.

That was V.J. Freshot, executive director at Tri-Continental. Thank you. This is endgame.