New Statesman - George Eaton
The US professor warns that the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and rising authoritarianism mean the risk of human extinction has never been greater.
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Noam Chomsky pictured in Brazil in 2018. HEULER ANDREY/AFP via Getty Images
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Noam Chomsky has warned that the world is at the most dangerous moment in
human history owing to the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war
and rising authoritarianism. In an exclusive interview with the
New Statesman, the 91-year-old US linguist and activist said that the current perils exceed those of the 1930s.
“There’s
been nothing like it in human history,” Chomsky said. “I’m old enough
to remember, very vividly, the threat that Nazism could take over much
of Eurasia, that was not an idle concern. US military planners did
anticipate that the war would end with a US-dominated region and a
German-dominated region... But even that, horrible enough, was not like
the end of organised human life on Earth, which is what we’re facing.”
Chomsky was interviewed in advance of the
first summit of the
Progressive International (18-20 September), a new organisation founded by Bernie Sanders, the former US presidential candidate, and
Yanis Varoufakis,
the former Greek finance minister, to counter right-wing
authoritarianism. In an echo of the movement’s slogan “internationalism
or extinction”, Chomsky warned: “We’re at an astonishing confluence of
very severe crises. The extent of them was illustrated by the last
setting of the famous Doomsday Clock. It’s been set every year since the
atom bombing, the minute hand has moved forward and back. But last
January, they abandoned minutes and moved to seconds to midnight, which
means termination. And that was before the scale of the pandemic.”
This
shift, Chomsky said, reflected “the growing threat of nuclear war,
which is probably more severe than it was during the Cold War. The
growing threat of environmental catastrophe, and the third thing that
they’ve been picking up for the last few years is the sharp
deterioration of democracy, which sounds at first as if it doesn’t
belong but it actually does, because the only hope for dealing with the
two existential crises, which do threaten extinction, is to deal with
them through a vibrant democracy with engaged, informed citizens who are
participating in developing programmes to deal with these crises.”
Chomsky
added that “[Donald] Trump has accomplished something quite impressive:
he’s succeeded in increasing the threat of each of the three dangers.
On nuclear weapons, he’s moved to continue, and essentially bring to an
end, the dismantling of the arms control regime, which has offered some
protection against terminal disaster. He’s greatly increased the
development of new, dangerous, more threatening weapons, which means
others do so too, which is increasing the threat to all of us.
“On
environmental catastrophe, he’s escalated his effort to maximise the use
of fossil fuels and to terminate the regulations that somewhat mitigate
the effect of the coming disaster if we proceed on our present course.”
“On
the deterioration of democracy, it’s become a joke. The executive branch
of [the US] government has been completely purged of any dissident
voice. Now it’s left with a group of sycophants.”
Chomsky
described Trump as the figurehead of a new “reactionary international”
consisting of Brazil, India, the UK, Egypt, Israel and Hungary. “In the
western hemisphere the leading candidate is [Jair] Bolsonaro’s Brazil,
kind of a small-time clone of President Trump. In the Middle East it
will be based on the family dictatorships, the most reactionary states
in the world. [Abdel al-]Sisi’s Egypt is the worst dictatorship that
Egypt has ever had. Israel has moved so far to the right that you need a
telescope to see it, it’s about the only country in the world where
young people are even more reactionary than adults.”
He
added: “[Narendra] Modi is destroying Indian secular democracy, severely
repressing the Muslim population, he’s just vastly extended the
terrible Indian occupation of Kashmir. In Europe, the leading candidate
is [Viktor] Orbán in Hungary, who is creating a proto-fascist
state. There are other figures, like [Matteo] Salvini in Italy, who gets
his kicks out of watching refugees drown in the Mediterranean.”
Of
the UK, he said: “[Nigel] Farage will come along and be a proper
candidate if Boris Johnson doesn’t serve the purpose, which he may.” He
added that the UK government’s threat to “violate international law and
make a total break with the European Union” would “turn a fading Britain
into even more of a vassal of the United States then it’s already
become”.
Chomsky
described the Progressive International, whose council also includes
former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, novelist Arundhati Roy and
former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, as “a loose
coalition of people committed to a world of justice, peace, democratic
participation, of changing social and economic institutions, so that
they are not geared for private profit for the few but for the needs and
concerns of the general population.”
Having
lived through 22 US presidential elections, Chomsky warned that Trump’s
threat to refuse to leave office if defeated by Democratic candidate
Joe Biden was unprecedented.
“He’s already announced repeatedly that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election
he won’t leave.
And this is taken very seriously by two high-level military officers,
ex-military leaders, who’ve just sent a letter to the chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff, reviewing for him his constitutional duties if
the president refuses to leave office and gathers around him the
paramilitary forces that he’s been using to terrorise people in
Portland.
“The
military has a duty in that case, the 82nd Airborne Division, to remove
him by force. There’s a transition integrity project, high-level people
from the Republicans and the Democrats; they’ve been running war games
asking what would happen if Trump refuses to leave office – every one of
them leads to civil war, every scenario that they can think of except a
Trump victory leads to civil war. This is not a joke – nothing like
this has happened in the history of parliamentary democracy.
“It
was bad enough when your guy, Boris Johnson, prorogued parliament, which
led to a furore. The Supreme Court intervened but it was too late. The
[US] Supreme Court isn’t going to intervene here, not after the
right-wing appointments that Trump has managed, so we’re at a moment
that has never happened.”
Chomsky
urged US leftists to vote for Biden in this November’s presidential
election and to press him to pursue a progressive agenda.
“What
the left should do is what it always should do: it should recognise
that real politics is constant activism, in one form or another. Every
couple of years something comes along called an election, you should
take off a few minutes to decide if it’s worth voting against somebody,
rarely for somebody. In the course of, say, Corbyn in England, I would
have voted for him but most of the time the question is ‘who do you vote
against?’
“This
time the answer to that question is just overwhelmingly obvious: the
Trump Republicans are just so utterly outrageous, way off the spectrum,
that there’s simply no question about voting against them. So you take
off a few minutes, go to the voting booth, push a lever, vote against
Trump, which in a two-party system means you have to push the vote for
the other candidate. But then the next thing you do is to challenge
them, keep the pressure on to move them towards progressive programmes.”
Asked whether he still identified as an anarchist, Chomsky replied: “We
have to ask what we mean by ‘anarchist’. In my view everybody, if they
stop to think about it, is an anarchist, except the people who are
pathological. The core principle of anarchism, from its origins, has
been that authority and domination and hegemony have a burden of proof
to bear, they have to prove that they’re legitimate. Sometimes they are,
sometimes you can give an argument. If you can’t, they should be
dismantled.
“How
should they be dismantled? Well, you have to work on that, you can’t do
it by snapping your fingers. Organisations are developing elements of
the future society within the present one. But I think that ideal is
virtually universal within our moral system, except for really
pathological elements.”
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