To the friends and readers of Defend Democracy Press

06/09/2025

Dear friends and readers,

The Delphi Initiative and the Defend Democracy Press website were created respectively ten and nine years ago, on the occasion of a major international conference organized ten years ago near Delphi, Greece, addressing the Greek and European crisis: https://www.defenddemocracy.press/delphi-forum-20-21-june-2015-delphi-greece/.

The central idea of the conference had essentially been formulated much earlier (https://www.defenddemocracy.press/common-appeal-for-the-rescue-of-the-peoples-of-europe/), was that no country can overcome on its own the concentrated economic and geopolitical power of “globalization,” meaning the global dictatorship of Financial Capital. An international force is needed for such an endeavor. The participants in our conference also agreed that addressing one crisis or another is not enough, because we are facing a systemic crisis overall—namely, the attempt by the Finance Aristocracy to take back all the achievements of humanity in the modern era and to build a new totalitarianism. We agreed that the economic war against Greece, the war of the European “elites” against the democratic and social rights of the European peoples, the threat against Russia through NATO’s constant expansion, and the war against the Global South, against Civilization and against the Natural Environment are but the “sub-chapters” of a gigantic “Counter-Revolution.”

Let us recall at this point that we began our effort with the support of some very important people, who unfortunately are no longer with us, and to whom we remain deeply grateful; we bow to their memory and their contribution to humanity’s struggles. These include development economist and a great defender of the Third World, Samir Amin; the great intellectual Immanuel Wallerstein; the leader of Cypriot socialism, a protagonist and veteran in the national liberation movements of Asia and Africa, Vasos Lyssarides; UN advisor and minister in several Greek socialist governments, Gerasimos Arsenis; Italian journalist and MEP Giulietto Chiesa; British anthropologist David Graeber; German scholar Elmar Altvater. We also thank all the others who have helped our effort but prefer to remain anonymous.

We fear that these analyses of ours have been confirmed, even exceeded, by the events of the last decade, by what has happened in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, and the continuous deterioration of the climate and the entire natural environment. Of course, where there is action, there is also reaction. We see today a huge movement shaking all of humanity against the genocide being carried out by Israel in Palestine, against the revival of the methods of Fascism and Nazism, and also against the totalitarian control of our countries by financial capital and the Zionist lobbies that dominate within it.

DefendDemocracy.Press has tried, on the one hand, to highlight this organic unity between the different “fronts” of the global crisis, to provide reliable information in an era of unprecedented confusion, disinformation, and misinformation, and to connect forces struggling in very different environments and, seemingly at least, for very different issues.

We hope the result has been very satisfactory, given the overall political climate, the objective conditions, and our extremely limited resources. Furthermore, we did not remain solely on the level of analysis. As early as July 2022, at a time when almost no one in the entire West dared to offer the slightest criticism of NATO’s reckless policy in Ukraine—which risked and still risks leading to nuclear annihilation—we, together with the “Bandung Spirit” collective, took the initiative to unite several hundred intellectuals and personalities from Europe and around the world in a first appeal to stop this madness: https://www.defenddemocracy.press/an-urgent-appeal-to-the-world-public-opinion-stop-the-war-before-it-is-too-late/. We were also among the first to note the similarity between the methods of the Nazis and those of Israel and called for the severing of all relations with that state: https://bandungspirit.org/IMG/html/stop_the_genocide-list_of_signatures.html.