New whistle-blower for the global left Julian Assange
Julian Assange

Julian Assange

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
When Samuel Huntington mapped the faultlines around which the 21st century will cave in, he accurately foresaw religion and culture taking over from ideology as the headline sites of conflict.

While popes and clerics can marshall numbers against rival hegemons, Huntington argues that the hungry base of the pyramid cannot equally assert itself because it is underequipped and incapable of organising.

Whether the poor masses of the world are indeed a skeleton without screws or Huntington is out to scatter Karl Marx’s ashes into the sewer, the new nodes of resistance against the global elites cannot be lightly dismissed.

If Huntington’s geopolitical classic, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order,” ably spies into the future, his relegation of the class struggle to the footnotes of modern history may be his most uncertain wager.

The global elites are known to win their wars even after losing every battle, but the underclass feels its alienation bitterly, asserts itself increasingly and coheres along technological inroads Huntington may not have forseen 21 years ago.

Rap maverick Tupac Sharkur, who died the year Huntington published “The Clash of Civilizations,” prophesied the poor will not be indefinitely tamed because the same forces pressing them down primes them to spring retribution into the face of their suppressors.

Tupac Sharkur

Tupac Sharkur

“The ground is gonna open up and swallow the evil. That’s how I see it; my word is bond. I see and the ground is the symbol for the poor people; the poor people is gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people,” Tupac says in an interview brought to public attention, amid sprawling effects, on the 2015 track “Mortal Man.”

In this day, the cause of the underdog is ably championed from the ranks of the brightest and bravest. Although their victories can be hosed down to vanity trips, they are increasingly calling the elites to moral responsibility on intellectual, cultural, political technological frontiers.

Whistleblowers especially command hushed respect in the ranks of the global left. The latest Promethean bogeyman blowing steam in the face of the elites is Yanis Varoufakis, the maverick former Greek finance minister who teaches economic theory at the University of Athens.

This year, Varoufakis takes “constructive disobedience” to the next level, publishing “Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment,” a whistleblowing political memoir which blows the cover off the West’s misanthropic elites, precisely the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU).

Charges that the neo-liberal hegemons which reign atop nations squeeze citizens to fatten oligarchs, orchestrating the suffering of millions just to stamp out dissent, have been often brushed off as conspiracy theory. The allegations stand up in this book, seeing as it was written with inside access.

It seems Varoufakis never took a break after publishing “And the Weak Suffer What They Must,” another retrospective stroke into his turbulent tenure as Greek finance minister. But his latest offering is even more ambitious and dial-shifting in the way Varoufakis fearlessly extracts from his undercover trove the dirty secrets global elites live by.

Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis

Varoufakis, who has written several books on the financial imbalance in the world, the European debt crisis,  and game theory, is consistently and pleading the case of the underdog against back channel conspirators who preside over the penury and misery of defenceless millions.

Whereas he wrote his early books as a game theorist, his dip into certifiable inside information gleaned during his brief tenure in the corridors of power lends force to his cause. A preliminary note on sourcing reads like a subliminal boast.

Varoufakis secretly recorded EU and IMF counterparts on his smartphone during Greek debt negotiations.  “I have been able to draw on audio recordings that I made on my phone, as well as on notes I made at the time, of many of the official meetings and conversations that appear in this book.”

In an instructive anecdote, former US secretary of treasury and Harvard chancellor Larry Summers, whose support Varoufakis sought for Syriza’s anti-austerity campaign, asked him whether he was an outsider, prioritising individual scruples and free expression over the establishment, or an insider, blending imperceptibly into the system. Varoufakis’s answer at the time tip-toed around equivocation, he now flaunts the publication of his book as proof that he is a hardened outsider.

Varoufakis’s ministerial tenure was dramatic and doomed as he sought to reverse a raft of austerity measures levelled at the first developed country to default on an IMF debt. He raved against “extend and pretend” mechanisms bound to keep Greece eternally in debt, trimming down the social economy and burdening other European taxpayers.

 Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

His book accuses the neo-liberal superstructure of conspiring to privilege German and French banks at the cost of “the Greek tragedy.” His dishes out files out of his smartphone on his nemesis, Wolfgang Schäuble, his former boss, Alexis Tsipras and others, while he walks the book as a beast among men, if only for stacking principle over politics.

He compares favourably to his former prime minister and collaborator who sacrificed him for the Troika, bypassing their populist referendum victory to accept even more bitter medicine. Varoufakis shares the human details of the austerity regime, stories like the self-destruction of a disabled man deprived of his social package.

Like his previous memoir, Varoufakis’s latest book taps into his classical intelligence, humour and populism. The title, however, does not similarly reach back to Shakespeare. It is an ungenerous riff on Christine Largade’s request that seating adults in the room was requisite if a deal was to be brokered.

To hear Varoufakis tell it, the Troika chased him out of that room with a poisoned assegai, economically blackmailing Greece to ensure that Syriza backpedals from its anti-austerity crusade. Tsipras had no option but to sacrifice his right hand maverick as the European Central Bank hanged Greece out to dry. Even a populist referendum was not enough to move the behemoth.

Varoufakis makes free with pub jokes to illustrate bankers’ delusions. “Art and Conn, goes the tale, decide that they have to do something to lift themselves out of poverty, so they persuade Olcán, a local publican, to lend them a barrel of whiskey. Their plan is to roll it down the road to the next town where a fete is to be held, where they will sell its contents by the cup.

“Rolling the barrel along the road, they stop for a rest under a great oak. While they are sitting under the tree, Art finds a shilling in his pocket, rejoices and asks, ‘Hey, Conn, if I give you a shilling can I have a cup of our whiskey?’ ‘Aye, go on,’ replies he, pocketing the shilling.

“A minute later Conn realizes he now has a shilling to spend, turns to his companion and asks, ‘Art, what do you say? If I give you a shilling can I also have a cup?’ ‘Aye, Conn,’ Art agrees, taking back his shilling. And so they proceed, the shilling changing hands, until hours later Art and Conn are fast asleep under the oak tree with great grins on their faces, the barrel empty.”

Varoufakis, the latest high-profile Western outsider, has fallen in with subversive company, from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to linguist, Noam Chomsky. His DiEM25 citizen movement proposes an alternative to austerity policies that it conflates with the rise of the new right.

The guerrilla intelligence leading to this book comes as no surprise, considering Varoufakis’s bromance with Assange, whom he was recently schedule to share an event, themed “Constructive Disobedience” with.

Last year, he set up an event for the caged Wikileaks editor called “First They Came For Assange”: “Their first target was Assange, then Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden then … Who’s next?” Varoufakis was probably thinking of his own smartphone recordings, when he staged these events to whistleblowers.

“Adults in the Room,” is an ambitious political memoir, raving against opacity, exclusivity and misanthropy among the global elites and a fully realised retrospective arc, setting forth a controversial career in first person.

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