Yanis Varoufakis: Germany Is Banning Pro-Palestinians
Yanis Varoufakis was scheduled to deliver a video message to a Palestine conference in Berlin on Friday — but police shut down the event. Varoufakis tells Jacobin how the Germans silenced him and why they’ve now banned him from entering the country.
Yanis Varoufakis during an interview on April 8, 2024, in Milan, Italy. (Pier Marco Tacca / Getty Images)
A three-day Palestine conference in Berlin last weekend promised a show of solidarity with Gazans — and an act of defiance against the pro-Israel groupthink that dominates German media. But just two hours into the event that began on Friday, April 12, police invaded to cut off the power and forced the hundreds of participants to leave. Police banned all further sessions in the name of preventing unsubstantiated threats of “antisemitic and violence-glorifying remarks.”
One of the billed speakers was former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. Not only did police cancel his speech, but he posted that he’d been hit with a general ban in speaking in Germany, even via video link. Now Berlin media tell us that this has been reduced to a ban on traveling to the country. In an interview with Jacobin’s Loren Balhorn, Varoufakis explains why the German state is so committed to stifling dissent — and why its claim to be defending Jews is so hollow.
Loren Balhorn
You announced on social media that Germany had issued you a Betätigungsverbot, basically a ban on speaking in public in Germany, and prevented you from intervening at the Palestine conference in Berlin last weekend. Now some of the German press is claiming you were only issued an Einreiseverbot, a ban on entering the country. Either ban would be scandalous, of course — but can you begin by telling us what exactly happened and how you found out about it?
Yanis Varoufakis
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