Thank you very much. And thank you so much to all of the organizations who've been involved in hosting this today. And to Maria and Claudia who have organized this visit of mine to Austria. Can I ask you at the back, can you hear me okay? All right, so we don't need the microphone. That's a relief, because I have a terrible habit. When I speak, I walk around, and I don't like speaking behind anything, because when I was first in government in South Africa when I was in my 20s, about three weeks after we had our first democratic elections in 1994, I was asked to go on a government delegation to the United States and we went to Atlanta Georgia which as you might know is the home of CNN and also the coca-cola corporation and so when we arrived at Atlanta Airport and the reason we went to Atlanta is because it was obviously the home of Martin Luther King jr. When we arrived at the airport we were greeted by the mayor of Atlanta, who was a former basketball player. So to someone of my height he seemed to be about 9 foot 10. And he greeted us from behind a lectern, but the lectern was an illuminated coke can. And so after he'd welcomed us, my boss who I was travelling with, who was the Premier of the Gauteng province in South Africa, a man called Tokio Sachwale, said to me, Andrew I'm tired from this journey, you go and say thank you to the mayor. So I walked up behind the back of this Coke can, and I said a few words, and I went back down, and I hadn't been working with Tokyo very long, so I said to him, Chief, was that all right? And he said to me, what you said was fine, but all we could see was a very shiny bald head sticking out of the top of a coat cap. And I think since then I've always had an aversion to speaking behind anything. So I'm not going to talk specifically about any of the books that I've written. I might refer to them. I wrote a book called After the Party, Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future. This first came out in 2007 and some of what happened here I will talk about. It's about my experience in South Africa in the ANC. And I'll tell you a little bit about an arms deal, a very corrupt arms deal that we experienced in South Africa that I investigated. And during that I thought that in South Africa, because we were very new to government, all of us were activists. We never expected to be in government, to be members of parliament, to be ministers. And European arms companies managed to sell us $10 billion worth of arms, arms that we had absolutely no need of and that until today we've never used. And the only reason we bought them is because over $350 million of bribes were paid. Because the arms trade accounts for 40% of all corruption in global trade. And crucially, crucially, much of those bribes are used to fund our main political parties in the West and enrich our most senior politicians, military leaders, and intelligence leaders, as well as corporate executives. But I only found this out subsequently. And when I discovered this and realized that in South Africa we hadn't been particularly stupid or particularly naive, and realized that in South Africa we hadn't been particularly stupid or particularly naive, I started writing this book, The Shadow of the World, inside the global arms trade. The first edition was published in late 2011. It's now in, I think, its 11th edition. And it was the first book published on the global arms trade since 1979. Because this is the most secretive of all trades, which is why it's so corrupt. It has its own set of laws and rules. And the only people who could regulate and control it are the very same people who benefit from it, politically and financially. Now it's also quite important to state, in the world we live in, which some people call a post-fact world, people say a lot of things. People like Donald Trump, my own Member of Parliament Keir Starmer, who I stood against in the last British election. The Chancellor of Germany, his name I don't even know, who looks and sounds exactly like the last Chancellor of Germany. I was very confused when I saw him speaking for the first time and wondered if they'd actually had an election. They'll say one thing at 9 o'clock in the morning and the opposite by 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and it doesn't seem to matter. So in all of my work, everything that I say to you, everything that is in our books, everything that is in our films, is based on evidentiary documents or sources that we identify. So this book, which looks quite thick, isn't this thing? One third of this is footnotes. There are over 3,000 footnotes. So if there's anything I say that you want to know more about, feel free to ask me. If you want to look at the documents that it's based on, they're in the book, so on our website, which is shadowworldinvestigations.org. This is the latest book we've done with the Peace and Justice Project, which is the project of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom. It's called Monstrous Anger of the Guns, but more important than that is the subtitle, which is How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the world and what we can do about it. And today what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about our struggle in South Africa, what worked, what didn't work, how we achieved a partial liberation, because the country faces huge, huge challenges, and whether there are some lessons that we can learn from the struggles of today. Because the reality is that I can't remember a time, and I'm about to turn 61, I can't remember a time in my life having grown up in a racist apartheid system when the world was in more of a mess than it is today. Where... where in the West, what we sometimes refer to as the global North, we have the best democracies money can buy. Because they're bought and paid for. Keir Starmer, Donald Trump, whatever the German Chancellor's name might be, or someone in the documentary that was made of the shadow world, as an arms dealer said, they're the middle managers, They're not the bosses. They answer to their billionaire donors, their corporate supporters. And we saw that in the British election, where a private equity firm called Quadrature gave the Labour Party, which is a name that someone like Keir Starmer shouldn't be allowed to use, they gave him £4.4 million, the largest donation in the party's history. Why would a hedge fund be giving that amount of money to what is supposed to be a sort of left, centre-left party? Well, because they know under him, business as usual, nothing will change, which is why we were allowed to have a change of party in Britain this time around. Because it's quite a good idea. It almost gives the sense that we have a democracy in the country. Because it's quite a good idea. It almost gives the sense that we have a democracy in the country. They're invested in two areas primarily. Fossil fuels and affairs. So in Keir Starmer's government's first budget, they decided to scrap their commitment to a green new economic plan, which was just transport, public infrastructure, but to increase defence spending by three billion pounds. Six months later, once in the United States of America one family the Bidens who have huge financial interests in the Ukraine were shifted and another family the trumps ruder more bra as corrupt, but who have huge interests in Russia. Once they've taken over, we've now decided we need to rearm Europe. So last week, Keir Starmer's government announced a £13.4 billion increase in the defence budget, which in 2029 will go up even further. Two days later, he announced a £7 billion cut to the National Health Service, a service that is already collapsing because of a lack of investment over more than a decade. Now, the only good thing I can say about my own local MP is that you don't have to guess when he's lying. You know he's lying every single time his lips move. And that, that is the nature of our politicians today. The very worst of us are the people who go into politics. They're not interested in ordinary citizens. They're not even interested in their own citizens, even in their own constituencies. In the area I live in, in Camden, where Keir Starmer is based, his local council is trying to push poor people out of our borough. They're trying to demolish social housing, council estates as we call them in Britain, to be able to build fancy office blocks for companies like Google, who they just gave one and a half million pounds to, to build a new head office. They want to build luxury apartments, where they don't have tenants who complain when their water doesn't work, when they have no electricity or heating. This is the state of our democracies. Now, I was incredibly lucky to experience a different type of leadership. Not perfect, because those leaders also were human. And if anybody has ever found a perfect human being, please introduce me to them. I'd love to meet them. But they at least had a vestige of commitment, to a cause, of honesty, of personal integrity. All of the things that if you have today, you can't go anywhere near politics. So I grew up in South Africa, quite clearly because you're looking at me as a white person. I experienced the most extreme privilege that a person on this planet could experience because I grew up during the system of apartheid. And for those of you who are a bit younger, let me just explain that the word apartheid is an Afrikaans word which was spoken by half of the white population in South Africa and it means separateness. And the theory behind apartheid was based on the white supremacist notion that different people of different race groups have different capacities, different intellects, different skills, and that people of different race groups should be kept apart. So our system was one of separateness but equality. Except a bit like Kirstama, we forgot about the equality bit and focused on the separateness. So as I was growing up, I would live in a suburb in which there were only white people. The only time you saw people of colour was when you saw people coming in to do manual work for us, the privileged white people. The jobs you were allowed to do, the schools you were allowed to go to, the universities you were allowed to go to, were determined by your race. And it wasn't enough to be just white or black. We had different gradations of race. So I was at the top of the pile because of the colour of my skin. Below me were people of so-called mixed race, what was referred to legally in South Africa as coloured people, and what were referred to as Asians. And I'm sorry to use this language, it to some people might be offensive, but this is the language that was used during apartheid and I'm trying to give you a sense of that. So Asian people were people mainly of South Asian descent who had come to South Africa to work on the sugar cane plantations. on the sugar cane plantations. And then you have black Africans, who are right at the bottom, 83% of the country's population, who are only allowed to do the most servile manual jobs, for whom there was one university in the country. Us whites, who constituted 10% of the population, had nine world-class universities. As I was schooled, almost 3,000 South African rands every year were spent on my education, about 200 rands was spent on the education of every coloured or Asian child and 90 rands was spent on the education of every black African child. White people were guaranteed a job simply because of the colour of our skin. There was zero unemployment amongst white South Africans. If you are unable to actually do any job competently, you got a job on our railway system as a wheel tapper. Literally, you had a little hammer and you tapped the wheels on the trailer. To what end? Nobody ever knew. You could be the smartest person on the planet, but if you were black, you had either work in the mines, or if you were black, you had to either work in the mines, or if you were lucky, you got a job tending the garden of some wealthy white person. In a mixed race, you could work in a restaurant as a waiter or waitress. But it went beyond that. My wife is from a country called Bangladesh. If we had lived in South Africa together during apartheid, we wouldn't have been able to live in the same suburbs. She would have had to live in the Asian group area, as it was called. I would have a relationship, let alone get married. But in addition to that, we would not even have been allowed to drive alone together in a car. The neo-Nazis who implemented the apartheid system and ran it, because they were neo-Nazis, most of our prime ministers post the Second World War were people who'd been jailed during the Second World War for their Nazi sympathies and their involvement with Nazi militias. What they thought we were going to do, driving alone together in a car, I'm not sure, but it too was illegal. That was the absurdity of the system that I grew up under. I was incredibly fortunate in another way. My mother wasn't South African. She was from a place some of you might have heard of called Floretsdorf in Vienna. She and her mother who were Jewish, her father was Catholic, survived the Second World War by being hidden in a coal cellar for three and a half years. Survived in Vienna. She lost dozens of her family, mainly in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. After the war, she went to London. That's where she met my dad. He had been sent there, there ironically by his very racist mother because he had got involved with a non-Jewish woman in Johannesburg and she would not accept that. So she sent him to London. He did something almost as bad. He got involved with a working class woman even though she was Jewish. And he took her back to South Africa. But when my mom got to South Africa, she felt that black South Africans were being treated just as the Jews of Europe had been treated by the Nazis. And so she got involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. So as I was growing up, during my school holidays, I would illegally go into townships, black townships, with my mother. I would go with her to the illegal theatre that she worked in. Why was it illegal? Because it had mixed audiences, non-racial audiences and non-racial performers. So it would regularly get closed down and they'd have to find a building somewhere else and open up again. And so I grew up meeting and interacting with people of all races. with people of all races. And in my late teens, I was working in a squatter camp, which is a camp just of shacks, just outside Cape Town, a place called Crossroads. And the apartheid military and security services decided to burn down the entire community of 70,000 Shaks. So 70,000 plus families lost the few possessions they had. Why did they do that? Because it was a politically militant community. And I ran a relief operation for those 70,000 families. And during that time I was invited to a meeting, which I didn't even realise at the time, it was actually a meeting of the ANC underground where we strategized about how we were going to respond to what had happened. So I ended up getting recruited into the ANC underground without even realizing I was being recruited. Now to give you some sense of how unusual this was, in 1994 when we became a democracy, less than half of 1% of white South Africans had ever been into a black area. That's how separate our lives were. So most white South Africans had no sense of the reality of the vast majority of people in our country. And we had, despite all of this, we had the most incredible liberation movement that I got introduced to almost by accident. Because you could go to jail for up to 12 years if you as much as had an image of Nelson Mandela, let alone anything he'd ever said or written. But in the black townships where I spent time, there was graffiti about him all over the place. And our struggle in South Africa? There you were, this racist country, and then suddenly you became this rainbow nation, as Desmond Tutu called it. Our struggle lasted for over 350 years. That's why we call it struggle, because it's not easy. The ANC itself, which came to lead the struggle, was founded in 1912 by a very small segment of mainly middle-class black Africans. Nelson Mandela was in the second generation of ANC leaders. The first generation was a group of leaders under a man called Albert Letouli, who actually won the Nobel Peace Prize. Highly intelligent, middle-class, which is incredibly unusual in South Africa. Mandela, who had a law degree, although he never finished it. Walter Sisulu, who was the only black African real estate agent in the whole of South Africa. And a few others were the leaders of this organization. And the interesting thing is, by comparison to the first generation of leaders, they were seen as the radicals. Why? Because Nelson Mandela, when he was president of the ANC Youth League, the Communist Youth Organisation of Austria. He insisted that our struggle couldn't just be peaceful because the apartheid state was so brutal and violent. And when in 1960, in a place called Schaapvo, And when in 1960, in a place called Sharpeville, the apartheid military shot dead in cold blood 74 women who were protesting the fact that black people in South Africa had to carry what was called a passbook, an ID book, that identified them as black. And that if you was called a passbook, an ID book, that identified them as black. And that if you worked in a white area, that book had to be stamped. And it said you were allowed to be in that area until sunset. And if you were caught in that area after sunset, or if you didn't have the right stamp in your passbook, you'd be sent to jail for 90 days. And they were protesting this. And they were shot dead. And it was at that point that Mandela said, we have to fight back. So I belong to an organisation that formed in armed struggle. Even though I'm now described as an anti-militarist, it's a different thing to being a pacifist. But our struggle took many forms, the most important of which was the organising of the vast majority of people important of which was the organising of the vast majority of people in our country. And we organised them to the extent that on every single street in South Africa in a black township or squatter settlement there was what we call the street committee. And everybody on that street knew what their role in the struggle was. But the apartheid state would pick out the leaders, would throw them in jail, or just assassinate them. They had a number of different assassination squads that used to go around the country, killing activists. And they had some collaborators in the black community as well. A few of them, but there were some. And ultimately this strategy of organising in street committees led to a process of making South Africa ungovernable. And how did we do that? First of all, of course, were workers. Because the apartheid state was entirely dependent on the labour of the black workforce. South Africa's wealth comes from natural resources. We have the largest gold deposits in the world. We have huge deposits of iron ore, of titanium, and sadly of uranium as well, which is how we became a nuclear well, which is how we became a nuclear power and how we helped the state of Israel become a nuclear power. Because this state, driven by neo-Nazis, was incredibly close to the apartheid state. So we once had the absurd reality that our Prime Minister, a man called B.J. Forster, who had been jailed during the Second World War because of his Nazi sympathies, we had him turning up in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, paying his respects at Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, and negotiating with Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, a deal that would see both these pariah nations become nuclear powers. And BJ Foster was the most brutal of our leaders. He had a white comrade from our struggle thrown out of the window on the 10th floor of the main police building in Johannesburg, which was named after him. It was called BJ Foster, the building. He was the man who ordered the murder of an extraordinary leader called Steve Biko. Steve Biko was a very charismatic young leader, not from the ANC, but a different faction of the liberation struggle called the Black Consciousness Movement. And the difference between the Black Consciousness Movement and the ANC was that the Black Consciousness Movement believed that liberation was not only a material thing, but it was also a psychological thing. And that the leadership of our liberation struggle should be amongst black people and that white people should not occupy leadership positions in the liberation struggle, a position in which I actually agree. And Steve Biko during the 1960s and early 70s was a more inspirational And Steve Miko during the 1960s and early 70s was a more inspirational and better known figure than Nelson Mandela. So one night the police threw him in the back of a police vehicle, drove him a ten hour drive from his home in the eastern cape of the country to Johannesburg where they were planning to torture him. But they beat him up so badly on the journey that he died en route. So we have the strategy of ungovernability, starting with wave after wave of industrial starting with wave after wave of industrial strikes that started to affect the economy of South Africa very badly. And then the ungovernability in the townships, where if a vehicle of the apartheid police or army tried to come into that area, the local community would put up blockades, burning tyres, barbed wire. We would dig up the road and put up parts of what we dug up to stop the tanks and the other military vehicles from coming into the township. And why was this important? Why was it important to stop the state coming into black townships? Well, it meant they couldn't stop the political activity that was taking place in those townships, but as importantly, the state derived significant income from those townships and squatter settlements. Because in South Africa, in black areas, the only entity that was allowed to sell alcohol was the state. It had a monopoly on alcohol in black areas. And that made it a lot of money. And that made it a lot of money. So over 80% of the population, the only place from which they could buy alcohol was the state that was oppressing them. So by preventing the state from coming into their areas, the state lost that income. And people started to brew alcohol themselves. And a boycott of the state-supplied alcohol started. But then, there was another absolutely crucial dimension to that strategy. So in 1955, when the ANC had been banned and made illegal and many of its leaders started to be arrested, the most famous of whom was Mandela who was known as the Black Pimpernel because he was on the run for so many years and they couldn't capture him. Others of our leaders who weren't imprisoned, who weren't killed, went into exile. Most of them in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, some in Angola, and some in London, where the ANC opened an office. And that strategy was to isolate the apartheid regime, internationally. So Oliver Tambo, who was our president because Nelson Mandela was in jail, based in London, started lobbying the United Nations Western governments. And of course governments in the East as well. The Soviet Union donated hugely to the ANC, trained most of our leadership at universities in the Soviet Union, trained most of our military women. But in fact, most material support came not from the Soviet Union, but from Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden. But then the other thing that this movement in exile did that was so important is it started telling the world about apartheid South Africa and how its own governments were supporting that system. Because we should never forget that Western governments were massive supporters of the apartheid state. There's a brilliant book written called Apartheid Guns and Money that goes into detail about how our countries, our governments in the West supported the apartheid state and maintained it for decades and decades. for decades and decades. And this came to be most apparent when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in power. Because whereas some of the others had hidden their support for this legalized racist system, Thatcher and Reagan didn't bother. Thatcher's husband, Dennis, had made millions and millions of dollars by breaking the oil and arms embargo on apartheid South Africa. Ronald Reagan had a strategy that was called constructive engagement with the apartheid state. That meant that the US military and intelligence services worked together in a war that was being fought with the so-called frontline states, South Africa's African neighbouring states. And this included a conflict in Angola, a conflict in Mozambique. And they provided political and material support. In fact, Margaret Thatcher privately suggested to the apartheid government that they should have Nelson Mandela killed in prison, because it was too dangerous to keep him alive because he was becoming almost a myth in his own lifetime. But what the ANC did was it mobilized tens of millions of people around the world against the apartheid state and it did this through using every possible vehicle imaginable, through culture, music. There were huge concerts that many of you are too young to know anything about, but you should look up on YouTube, because they were incredible. There used to be massive concerts around the world to celebrate Mandela's birthday, to celebrate the people of South Africa. They tried to bring diplomatic and political pressure on governments to make it more difficult for governments to support this system of apartheid. But the most important thing that we did internationally was we initiated that we did internationally was we initiated a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. BDS. And what that involved was targeting a very limited number of huge, very well-known companies to try and force them to divest from South Africa. The targets were Shell, Barclays Bank, and a bank called Chase Manhattan. I don't know what it's called in the US today, JP Morgan maybe, it's changed its name so often I can't keep up with it. So with Shell, there were campaigns all over the world. Don't fill up at Shell. There were campaigns against buying any South African produce, particularly our most famous export, which was oranges, bizarrely. And this was an easy way in which people could themselves show solidarity with the struggle against apartheid. When you were in the supermarket, you just walked past the South African produce. And eventually, because it wasn't being sold and it was just rotting on the shelves, the biggest supermarket stopped stocking South African goods. And then with the two banks, it was about getting people to close their accounts with those banks and ensuring that young people did not open accounts with those banks. Soon enough, those banks realized that they were going to lose out on an entire generation of customers to their competition. And that was the key. Because in 1988, Barclays Bank and Chase Manhattan decided not to roll over South Africa's foreign debt. Decided that they were going to charge a premium to South Africa if it wanted foreign exchange. And the combination of that and the fact that South African products were being boycotted with what was happening domestically in our country, wave after wave of strife, ungovernability, wave after wave of strife, ungovernability, started to undermine the South African economy fundamentally. And the most important part of that undermining of our economy was that the quality of life of ordinary white South Africans, the vast majority of whom had voted for apartheid election after election after election, their quality of life started to decline. And that was the beginning of the end of the apartheid state. of the end of the apartheid state. So what relevance does that experience have for us today? Well, look where we sit in 2025. We're still talking about a party that is defended and supported by our governments in the West. We are talking about the greatest levels of inequality that have ever been experienced in economic history. In Britain today we have more billionaires than we have ever families needing to use food banks to feed themselves than at any time since the end of the Second World War. How can those two things exist together in any sane society. And we have government by a tiny elite who control our countries politically and economically in ways that are completely intertwined. And these systems of government are funded by the financial institutions who own the defense companies, who own all of our commercial media, and who have massive stakes in most of our biggest corporations in the West, are participating actively in a live-screen genocide weapon in which we are prepared to take the entire edifice of the international rule of law that was created after the Holocaust to ensure that never again became exactly that. We are prepared to throw all of that away in order to enable the state of Israel to continue to commit a genocide. And unfortunately, unfortunately, there are many parallels between the State of Israel and Apartheid South Africa. There is one fundamental difference that has enabled this genocide to take place. And that is that in apartheid South Africa, the state required the black labor force to mine our natural resources. Whereas Israel is not dependent economically on the people of the occupied Palestinian territory. South Africa, the apartheid state, would never have slaughtered 60 or 100, thousand people because these would have been people in the workforce who would have had to be replaced, retrained and there would have been an economic cost. And the way our states are behaving today is in my opinion even more shameful than they behaved in their attitude to apartheid South Africa. And at the core of this is the global arms trade about which I write, and which over the past few years has seen its share prices and its profits reach unimaginable levels. These are companies that are effectively subsidised by our governments using our tax money to produce the weapons that are being used in the commission of a genocide. And it is incredibly important and symbolic that it was South Africa that took Israel to the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice. And that that court, headed at the time by an American judge, despite the pressure of the American government and others, found in its preliminary ruling that Israel is likely committing a genocide. For myself, as someone who has lectured at Auschwitz for the Auschwitz Institute on genocide prevention, I didn't need the ICJ to tell on genocide prevention. I didn't need the ICJ to tell me this was a genocide. I needed the evidence that we are finding on the ground every single day because we are tracking the weapons that are being used and what they are being used for. And our governments are providing intelligence support for Israeli targeting and are providing the weapons Israel needs to keep killing tomorrow the way they have today and despite the ceasefire as of a week ago, 203 Palestinians had been killed in the occupied territories, sorry, only occupied territories, in Gaza alone, since the so-called ceasefire. Earlier today, Israel cut off electricity, effectively ensuring that the only functioning desalination plant in Gaza is no longer operating, which means they have lost 90% of their clean drinking water. That, according to the Geneva Conventions, is a war crime. That is the most extreme violation of international humanitarian law we have seen since IHL was introduced. we have seen since IHL was introduced. But my local member of parliament in Camden, in London, in the United Kingdom, believes Israel has the right to deprive the Palestinian people of electricity, water, food, and health care. And he, Keir Starmer, was once a human rights lawyer. This is the depravity of the world today. So in conclusion, let's ask ourselves the question and let's talk about what we do about this as ordinary human beings. Now the first thing that is important to understand is it's not about making better laws. Because the reality is, we have arms export control laws. But all of our countries that are involved in the arms business, and Austria also plays a role in the arms business, and Austria's banks are deeply involved in the arms business. But we don't apply our laws. Because when it comes to national security, our governments can do what they like. And we've had judgements in Italy, in Germany, in France, in Britain, where judges say on matters of national security and defence, the executive arm of government must be left to pursue its own policies. In other words, they can break the law if they want to. And they do. The EU common position on arms export states if the export of a particular armament will make it more likely that civilians will be harmed, that export cannot go ahead. How have our governments been supplying Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with weapons as they have for almost 10 years bombed innocent civilians in Yemen? How are our governments able to continue exporting the bombs, the missiles, the spare parts, the components for the plane that continue to slaughter people in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon. We have a UN international arms treaty signed in 2014 that has exactly the same stipulation in it. Germany, France, Italy, Britain claim to be champions of this treaty, while every single day they violate it. We live in a lawless world. And what we've been taught is that the only lawless ones in this world are the Chinese, the Russian, North Koreans, and a few other bad actors. And we are the forces of right and good. Well, I'm afraid to say that on the basis of the work that I've been doing for the last 23 plus years, there are no good guys. There are only bad guys. And at the top of the pile sits that dangerous, failed businessman, reality TV star Donald Trump with his Nazi saluting white racist South African giving Nazi salutes at his side in Elon Musk. And their little poodles, like Keir Starmer and Macron and whoever the German Chancellor might be. That is the reality of the world we live in. We are now the bad guys. And so what do we do about that? It's not about changing the law, because our legal system has now decided they can do what they want. It's about changing the fundamental structures and functioning of our political systems, which are no longer fit for plantism. We are in what Antonio Gramsci described as a classic interregnum, where the old systems have died, but the new have not yet been born. And it is up to us, it is up to you, and I'm looking specifically at you who are a lot younger than me, to figure out what that new system must look like. And let me tell you something. If you are sitting here thinking that neoliberal capitalism as it's practiced today, and liberal representative democracy, which is what we claim our governmental systems are, if you think they are a part of the solution, then you're not getting the education you should be getting. because the reality is that our current systems are not fit for purpose and it's not just the extreme levels of inequality that show us that within our own countries, between our countries it is the fact that we are enabling, facilitating and profiting from a live-screened genocide. Because this time in history, none of us can say we didn't know. Because all we have to do to know is to switch on our phones. All our political leaders have to do to know is to switch on our phones. All our political leaders have to do to know is to switch on their phones. And despite that, they continue to allow this to happen. And there are some mechanisms that we use during the South African struggle that are directly relevant to what will bring about a change in our political systems, most fundamentally and most importantly, is reminding ordinary people that we are allowed to imagine and create a different world. Because the one thing that capitalism has done to us, that our education systems have done to us, is they have taken away our ability to imagine a different world. And that is so, so dangerous. And then the other thing that is so incredibly important is BDS. Not just against an apartheid state that is committing a genocide, but against our own governments. We have the power to remove ourselves from the very economic actors who are causing the situation as it is. And we have to create alternatives to them. And we have to create alternatives to them. Otherwise, the Nazi saluting white racist South African at Donald Trump's side is going to forever be the richest person on the planet. And it will ensure that our political systems don't change at all. And in case you weren't sure if it was a Nazi salute, political systems don't change at all. And in case you weren't sure if it was a Nazi salute, he helped us because two days later he was the keynote speaker at an AFD rally. Just in case any of us were a bit confused, like the so-called Anti-Defamation League was, that suggested that rather criticizing this human being who is making the Nazi salute, that oh, it was just a bit of over-exuberance because this is a moment of hope and a new beginning, while suggesting that someone who protests against a genocide should be kicked out of the United States of America. That is the state of our so-called human rights organisations. So the most important lesson we learned in South Africa, with all the odds against us was that we as individuals working collectively have agency. We can make change happen. And if you think this is crazy talk, then I'm going to tell you one final thing. In 1986, before many of you were born, I had to leave South Africa. With 48 hours notice, because otherwise I would have been forced to go into the apartheid military and to return in uniform to the very communities that I was working in. to go into the apartheid military and to return in uniform to the very communities that I was working in. And the night before I left, I was on a hill overlooking Cape Town, which in a completely scientific and unbiased manner I think is the most beautiful city on the planet. And I thought to myself, never again will I set foot in the country or city of my birth. Because if anybody then had told me that apartheid was on its last legs, while it was as militarily powerful as it had ever been, while it had support from the White House and from 10 Downing Street, in an open and brazen way that it had never had before, I would have used my training as a clinical psychologist and offered them a straitjacket because there was absolutely no evidence that that was going to happen in my lifetime. This is 1986. Four years later. Four years! Not only were schmucks like me allowed to go home, because my only crime had been to belong to an illegal organisation and to not turn up for my compulsory national service. Our political prisoners had been released, the ANC had been unbanned and we started a transition process. And when I went back to the country I worked as a facilitator in our negotiations process, where suddenly the prisoner of 27 years was now negotiating with the most right-wing state president the country had ever had, but who realised the game was up because the economy was collapsing on a daily basis. And a further four years after that, we had our first democratic election. A Nelson Mandela who had been described to us whites as a communist ogre, who would take our houses, our swimming pool, our cars, rape our daughters and sisters, and drive the rest of us into the sea, turned out to be this kindly old grandfather who just wanted a better world for all. And who said, as he'd said at his treason trial in the 1960s, I have spent my life fighting against white domination over white. All he wanted was for every single human being to be treated with the respect and dignity with which he wanted to be treated. So I saw in a period of eight years the most racist society established since the second world war. An incredibly powerful military power with massive natural resources, with nuclear weapons, become a democracy. An imperfect democracy that faces enormous challenges today. Massive corruption. Significant crime. Huge economic inequality that is still racially based. But it is no longer the racist oligarchy it was for over 350 years. And that was down to millions of ordinary South Africans and tens of millions of people around the world supporting them. as a 61-year-old old person, that fundamental structural change is possible. But I believe today more than ever that if we don't bring about that fundamental change very soon, not only will the planet we live on make it incredibly difficult for us to continue living, but the situation for the vast, vast majority of people on this planet will get worse and worse and worse. And a tiny minority will continue to get richer and richer and richer. That is the choice we face. So when you look for political leaders, don't look out there, just look in a mirror. Because real struggle is about mass participation and about everybody using the skills and the talents and the commitment that they have. On his release from prison, Nelson Mandela said two extraordinary things. After 27 years in an apartheid prison, he could have come out and said, let's have a party, I'm free. What did he say instead? He said, our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian people. So none of us are free because of the fact that there is a genocide being committed. is a genocide being committed. Because none of us are free, as long as there are millions of people on this earth who are not free. But he also said something else. He was asked how he had kept up his spirits, how he knew that we would be victorious during those long, long hours in an apartheid prison. And he said something very simple. He said, in spite of the insurmountable obstacles, in spite of the huge odds against us I know that it's only impossible until it's done thanks very much Applaus you you