By Travis Gettys
Friday, December 27, 2013 13:59 EST
The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.
“There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and
they’re getting more and more serious,” Chomsky said. “The one is the
continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It’s very serious,
and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe,
which is getting more and more serious.”
Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR’s
“Smiley and West”
program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how
he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream
media.
He told the hosts that the world was racing toward an
environmental disaster with potentially lethal consequence, which the
world’s most developed nations were doing nothing to prevent – and in
fact were speeding up the process.
“If there ever is future historians, they’re going to look back at
this period of history with some astonishment,” Chomsky said. “The
danger, the threat, is evident to anyone who has eyes open and pays
attention at all to the scientific literature, and there are attempts to
retard it, there are also at the other end attempts to accelerate the
disaster, and if you look who’s involved it’s pretty shocking.”
Chomsky noted efforts to halt environmental damage by indigenous
people in countries all over the world – from Canada’s First Nations to
tribal people in Latin America and India to aboriginal people in
Australia—but the nation’s richest, most advanced and most powerful
countries, such as the United States, were doing nothing to forestall
disaster.
“When people here talk enthusiastically about a hundred years of
energy independence, what they’re saying is, ‘Let’s try to get every
drop of fossil fuel out of the ground so as to accelerate the disaster
that we’re racing towards,’” Chomsky said. “These are problems that
overlie all of the domestic problems of oppression, of poverty, of
attacks on the education system (and) massive inequality, huge
unemployment.”
He blamed the “financialization” of the U.S. economy for income
inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were “too big to
fail” skimmed enormous wealth from the market.
“In fact, there was a recent (International Monetary Fund) study that
estimated that virtually all the profits of the big banks can be traced
back to this government insurance policy, and in general they’re quite
harmful, I think, quite harmful to the economy,” Chomsky said.
Those harmful effects can be easily observed by looking at unemployment numbers and stock market gains, he said.
“There are tens of millions of people unemployed, looking for work,
wanting to work (and) there are huge resources available,” Chomsky said.
“Corporate profits are going through the roof, there’s endless amounts
of work to be done – just drive through a city and see all sorts of
things that have to be done – infrastructure is collapsing, the schools
have to be revived. We have a situation in which huge numbers of people
want to work, there are plenty, huge resources available, an enormous
amount to be done, and the system is so rotten they can’t put them
together.”
The reason for this is simple, Chomsky said.
“There is plenty of profit being made by those who pretty much
dominate and control the system,” he said. “We’ve moved from the days
where there was some kind of functioning democracy. It’s by now really a
plutocracy.”
Chomsky strongly disagreed with Smiley and West that he had been
marginalized for his views, saying that he regretfully turned down
dozens of invitations to speak on a daily basis because he was otherwise
engaged.
He also disagreed that a platform in the mainstream media was necessary to influence the debate.
“If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place
in the country, say, just in the last 50 years – the civil rights
movement, the antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women’s
movement, the environmental movement and so on – they’re not led by any
debate in the media,” Chomsky said. “No, they were led by popular
organizations, by activists on the ground.”
He recalled the earliest days of the antiwar movement, in the early
1960s, when he spoke in living rooms and church basements to just a
handful of other activists and they were harassed – even in liberal
Boston – by the authorities and media.
But that movement eventually grew and helped hasten the end of the
Vietnam War, and Chomsky said it’s grown and become so mainstream that
antiwar activists can limit wars before they even begin.
He said President Ronald Reagan was unable to launch a full-scale war
in Central America during the 1980s because of the antiwar movement,
and he bitterly disputed the idea that antiwar activists had no impact
on the Iraq War.
“I don’t agree; it had a big effect,” Chomsky said. “It sharply
limited the means that were available to the government to try to carry
out the invasion and subdue the population. In fact, it’s one reason why
the U.S. ended up really defeated in Iraq, seriously had to give up all
of its war aims. The major victor in Iraq turns out to be Iran.”
Despite these limitations, he said the Iraq War had been one of the
new millennium’s worst atrocities and had provoked a violent schism
between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that had sparked regional conflicts
throughout the Middle East.
“The United States is now involved in a global terror campaign
largely against the tribal people of the world, mostly Muslim tribes,
and it’s all over. The intention is to go on and on,” Chomsky said.
“These are all terrible consequences, but nevertheless they’re not as
bad as they would be if there weren’t public opposition.”
