Eighty years after the anti-fascist victory, we are honored to meet in a nation that has conquered fascism not just on the battlefield, but at its social and economic roots.
The conditions that allowed fascism to brew in Western Europe and Japan were not historical accidents; they were systemic breakdowns. The roots of fascism are found in the crisis of unregulated capitalist economy, characterized by the relentless flow of capital, generating extreme income inequality, financial speculation, and systemic collapse as deep as the Great Depression. This economic rot was then amplified by two ideological pillars:
- The demonization of The Other – the foreign, the different – as the perceived cause of social failure and the target of organized hate.
- An ideology of exceptionalism and racial or national superiority – like Hitler’s Nazism or Japan’s Kokutai – which rely on the flawed notion that individual solutions can solve common, societal problems.
We are fortunate to stand in a nation that provides the ultimate counterexample. The model we see here, built on the efficient use of capital controls and central planning, has successfully lifted over 800 million people from poverty and stands as a testament to common prosperity over harmful competition. By promoting initiatives like the Global Civilization Initiative, which respects civilizational diversity and seeks mutual learning, the dangerous tendency toward exceptionalism is directly confronted.
This is why defending history and memory is crucial. We must state clearly: the neoliberal consensus dominating parts of the Global North today is dangerously re-creating the very economic conditions that first bred fascism. We must defend memory because a rewriting of history, via Hollywood and political discourse, aims to blur the true face of fascism and allows new, dangerous forms of extremism to emerge.
The Anti-Fascist War defeated an ideology, but the peace that followed—the Yalta System—embedded new structural inequalities that continue to define the Global South's struggle.
The peace defined at Yalta gave us the foundation for the United Nations, a necessity if we consider that many of our Latin American and Afro-Asian nations of the Third World only truly met and began interacting within the structures of the UN. However, for the Global South, Yalta was not the start of a Cold War, but the intensification of a particularly Hot War. Furthermore, the accepted notion of superpower spheres of influence reproduced a neocolonial partition of the world.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, the Yalta System relegated us to the eternal periphery of the United States. This structural position meant our development was perpetually subordinate to the hegemonic center as was later well articulated in the Dependency Theory. While our region has rejected this role, recent actions by the United States — seeking to impose a new Cold War mentality — show they still believe our countries are merely subjects for their dominance, guidance, and resource extraction.
The Yalta System forced upon our region the US National Security Doctrine. This doctrine reinforced existing colonial structures, especially in areas like land tenure, and supported human rights violations across the continent in the name of fighting communism.
This meant that social progress, income equality, and political participation were consistently sacrificed for the sake of Washington’s agenda. This policy led directly to atrocities like Operation Condor, a coordinated campaign of state terror against democratic and progressive forces throughout the Southern Cone. Today, the security pretexts have shifted — to drug-trafficking or terrorism — but the same attempt to impose US dominance persists.
Yet, this dominance generated its own counterforce: the spirit of Bandung—the idea of Non-Alignment and Third World solidarity, which placed anti-colonialism and development at the forefront of our agenda.
Today, the unipolar hegemony that emerged after the Cold War is collapsing into a crisis, giving way to a necessary surge of multipolarity. The question we must ask is: What should be our goal at this new stage?
In Latin America, the answer lies in our own history. Two hundred years ago, as the Spanish Empire faced its downfall, Simón Bolívar proposed the Panama Congress to forge a single Latin American pole. Bolívar saw this regional unity as necessary to create what he called the ‘universal equilibrium.’
He argued: ‘The ambition of the European nations takes the yoke of slavery to the other parts of the world; and all these parts should try to establish a balance amongst themselves and Europe, to destroy the preponderance of the latter. I call this the equilibrium of the Universe.’
The lesson is clear: for multipolarity to be successful, it must always seek equilibrium, not just a new division of the world among two or three great poles.
Today, we can argue that Bolívar’s concept of universal equilibrium enters direct dialogue with China’s international initiatives:
- Global Security Initiative (GSI): That seeks ‘common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security’ that respects the legitimate concerns of all States.
- Global Development Initiative (GDI): That aims for ensuring equal access to the development process; and
- Global Governance Initiative (GGI): Committed to sovereign equality and the international rule of law based on the UN Charter.
The Cold War equilibrium failed because it was based on spheres of dominance. Today, as that world collapses, we must turn to the ultimate instrument of universal equilibrium: the UN Charter itself.
Eighty years after its foundation, the United Nations has failed us. When a widely documented genocide unfolds before our eyes as it has in Palestine – a direct violation of the Charter's core purpose – and the UN system is paralyzed, where is the failure?
The failure is not in the Charter's ideals, but in the selectivity of its enforcement and the structures of control. The UN has also proven incapable of stopping the imposition of unilateral coercive measures on a third of the planet—economic warfare targeting sovereign peoples, and it has also proven unsuccessful at stopping extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean Sea affecting citizens of several member States.
Yet, the struggle for international law continues to be an essential necessity. The Charter is the only legally-binding, universally agreed set of norms that defends the idea of sovereign equality and the right of peoples to self-determination. To give up on the Charter is to give up on humanity.
This is why initiatives such as the formation of the Group of Friends of the UN Charter – to which both Venezuela and China belong to – are so vital. Since 2021, this group stands as a bulwark against the unilateral interpretation of a so-called 'rules-based order,' which, to be honest, is merely imperialism in new clothing. It is an attempt by a declining hegemon to reorganize the game—becoming player, arbiter, and rule-maker, all at the same time—in the face of its contracting rate of profit.
If we do not want to risk a destructive war that could end human life as we know it, we must stand for the strengthening of the UN. It is only with international law, as expressed in the UN Charter, that we can finally achieve the universal equilibrium which Bolívar spoke about 200 years ago.
This requires three fundamental demands for structural reform:
- Challenging Hegemonic Geography: We must promote a rotation of the General Assembly and Secretariat to challenge the hegemonic geography of the UN. Let us begin the process of moving parts of the UN headquarters to a major capital in the Global South.
- Breaking the Financial Veto: We must guarantee more contributions from strong economies, to override the current financial control ot the US of the decision-making process. Only this can end the US's effective financial veto over the work of critical UN agencies.
- Empowering the General Assembly: We must campaign to significantly increase the power and decision-making capacity of the General Assembly, where every country is equally represented. As difficult as it may be, we must consider a mechanism in which the veto power of the Security Council can be subject to a super-majority override by the General Assembly to stop a genocide or to end the illegal implementation of coercive measures.
We must push the UN to become the instrument of genuine, democratic, universal equilibrium.
Watch the whole speech here: