Noam Chomsky: The world is at the most dangerous

moment in human history

newstatesman.com/politics/2020/09/noam-chomsky-the-world-is-at-the-most-dangerous-moment-in-human-history

George Eaton September 17, 2020

US linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky (R), is pictured during a press conference after
visiting former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, arrested for corruption in the Federal Police
Superintendence in Curitiba, Brazil on September 20, 2018. (Photo by Heuler Andrey / AFP) (Photo
credit should read HEULER ANDREY/AFP via Getty Images)

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.”

[See also: Jeremy Cliffe: The Covid-19 crisis is a chance for progressives to rediscover
their lost internationalism]

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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.”

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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

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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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