Welcome to another world after coronavirus. I'm really happy and honored for this special episode
because there is a special guest joining us today, and that special guest is not only mine, but
a hero of many generations
Both of us are unfortunately in self-isolation. So this is also very special
occasion but without further
Introduction, I think most of you who are watching this know who is nan Chomsky
And I'm so glad that norm is joining us today
Hello norm, could you just tell us where are you? Are you already in self isolation? And for how long?
Well, I mean Tucson Arizona and so forth
So you wrote you were born in
1928 and
You wrote your first essay. As far as I know when you were only 10 years old
Which was an essay on the Spanish Civil War
Actually just after the fall of Barcelona
So that was 90 38
Which looks very far away for my generation?
You survived the Second World War?
Hiroshima I mean you were a witness to Hiroshima you were a witness to many
Very big important political historic events
From the Vietnam War to the oil crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall
Before that you were a witness to Chernobyl
after that
In the 90s you were a witness to to a historical moment
Which was leaving to 9/11 which was also a global event and most recently
I mean, I'm trying to really a short and a long history and the lifetime of someone like you
But the most recently when was the financial pressure of 2007 and 2008?
So in this background of such a rich life and being the witness and also an actor
in this
major historical processes
How do you look at the current?
coronavirus
Crisis, is it an unprecedented?
historical event
Is it something which surprised you and how do you look at it? That that would be my questions?
Sure, I'd say that
My earliest memories which are haunting me now or from the 1930s
the article of the mansion on the fall of Barcelona was
actually mainly about the
apparently
inexorable
spread of the fascist plague all over the all over Europe and it was going to end I
later much later discovered when internal documents came out that the
analyst of the US government at the time and in the following years expected that
The war would end
with a new war was coming that a war would end with the world divided into a
US
Dominated air regions and a German dominated region
so my childhood fears were not entirely out of place and
Those memories come back now. I
can recall
when I was a child young child listening to
Hitler's Nuremberg rallies over the radio. I couldn't understand the words, but you could easily
understand the moves and the threat
and so on and I have to say when I listened to
Donald Trump's rallies today
It resonates it's not that he's a fascist. He doesn't have that much of an idea
Love Jesus Toshio death, but an individual concerned with himself
but the mood and the fear similar and the idea that the fate of the
country in the world is in the hands of the
sociopathic buffoon
is
The coronavirus in series enough but it's worth recalling that there's a much greater
horror
approaching
We are
racing to the edge of disaster
Far worse than anything that's happened in human history
and
Donald Trump and his minions are in the lead in racing to the abyss
in fact, there are to
Amend the threat that we're facing
One is the growing threat of nuclear war
which
has exacerbated by
tearing folks left of the arms control regime and the other of course is the
growing threat of global warming both threats can be noticed, but there isn't a lot of time and
The corona virus is a horrible
Baby and have kept up many consequences, but there will be recovery
The others there won't be recovered
finished if you don't deal with them done and
So the
Childhood memories are coming back to the
different dimension
Threat of nuclear war you can get a sense of where the world really is by looking
Too early to this January as upper, you know every year in the Doomsday Clock. It's
said
The minute-hand a certain distance from midnight which means termination
But ever since Trump was elected the minute-hand has been moving closer and closer to midnight
last year was two minutes to midnight the
Iestyn
Matching the highest has ever reached this year the analysts for dispensed with minutes
started moving to second
100 seconds to midnight
That's the closest it's ever been
sighting three things
the
threat of nuclear war
threat of global warming and the deterioration of democracy which
Doesn't quite belong that 30th bit of it what it does because that's the one me hope that we have
for overcoming the crisis and inform and
Involve public taking control of their fate if that doesn't happen. We're doomed if we're leaving an ar-15
sociopathic with buffoons
We're finished. That's and that's coming. Close Trump is the worst
that's because of us power which is it will only
talk about us declawed but
You just look at the world. You don't see that when they you
imposes sankt
Devastating sanctions, it's the only country they can do that
but everyone has to follow
Europe may not like in fact a person is underground
But they have to follow have to follow the master girls. They're checked out of the international for the transition
That's not a law of nature
It's a decision in Europe to be subordinate to the master in Washington other countries
don't even have the choice and
Back to the coroner's lawyers one of the
most
shocking harsh aspects of it is the use of
sanctions to maximize the pain
perfectly consciously Iran is in a zone enormous internal problems, but
By the stranglehold of tightening sanctions
Which are consciously designed
openly to make the
suffer and suffer bitterly now
Cuba's been suffering from it from the moment that it gained independence, but
Astonishing but they survived that they stayed in Brazilian and one of the most ironic
Elements of today's
Virus crisis is that Cuba is helping Europe. I mean, this is
so shocking that you don't know how to describe it the German can't help Greece, but
Cuba can help European countries. If you stop to think about what that means of
Words fail that just was when you see
thousands of people dying in the
Mediterranean fleeing
freeze that has
Devastated for centuries and being sent to the deaths in the Mediterranean. You don't know what words to use
the
crisis the the civilizational crisis of the West at this point is
devastating to think of them and it does bring the trial to add memories of listening to
You mentioned the
crisis of democracy
At this moment. I think we find ourselves also in a historically unprecedented situation
in the sense that almost two billion people
That's a figure I found today are in one or the other way confined at home
Whether it is isolation self isolation or currently almost 2 billion people in the world
are at Hoag if they're lucky enough to have a home at the same time what we can witness is that
Europe
But also other countries closed their borders not only internal ones but outer borders
There is a mistake of exception
in all the countries we can think of
Which means curfew in many countries such as France?
Serbia Spain Italy and other countries are me on the streets and what I want to ask you as a linguist
Is the length language?
Which is now circulating around if you listen, not just to Donald Trump if you listen to micron
also some other European politicians, you will constantly hear that they speak about war and
even the media speak about doctors who are on the first frontline and
The virus is called an enemy
Which reminded me of course also not to childhood memories. Luckily, but the book which was written at that time
victor klemper a
Lingua, Terra team Perry the book which which is a book about the language of the Third Reich and in which way through language
The ideology was imposed so from your perspective
What does this discourse about war tell us and why do they present a virus as an enemy
Is it just to legitimize?
The new state of exception or is there something deeper in in this discourse?
Is this
Say
Don't protect the rhetoric, but I think it's not exaggerated
It has some significant
The meaning is that if we want to deal with the crisis, we have to move to something like wartime mobilization
so if you think of
Take a rich country like the United States
It as the resources to overcome the immediate economic business
Mobilization for the second world war
Led the country into far greater debt than is contemplated today and was very successful
foundation
practically quadrupled the US manufacturing ended the depression left the country with
Instead but a capacity to grow
That's less than we need probably not on that scale. It's not like this in a world war, but we need the
mentality of the
movement of a circle is to try to overcome the
Short-run the crisis which is severe
Also here we don't
recall the
swine flu
epidemic and
2009
originated in the US
the couple hundred Russian people at the first
sight he recovered from
worst
But it has to be dealt with that's a rich country like the states the others two billion people
The majority are in the India
What happens for?
Indian
pink and the mouth
Who's actually?
starves to death
What's gonna happen?
In a civilized world the rich countries would be giving assistance after those who were in need
Instead of strangling them, which is what do me
Particularly in India would in much of the world
But the current the crisis, you know whether the crisis can be
Within a country like India, I don't know bear in mind that
the with current tendencies if they persist
South Asia is going to be unlivable in a decade the temperature reached
50 degrees C and Rajasthan this summer and that's increasing the waters right now
Could get he's worse than two nuclear powers. They're gonna be fighting of
Restricting reduced water supplies. I mean the corona virus is very serious. We can't underestimate
but we have to remember that it's a
fraction small
Of major crises that are coming along they may not disrupt
life to the extent that the terminal virus does today, but they will
Disrupt life to the point of making the species
Unsurvivable and not in the very distant country. So we have many problems to deal with
Well immediate ones come on the wife's in serious has to be dealt with
Much larger ones vastly larger ones but looming and there is the civilizational crisis
We have to to time
Possibly
good side of
coronavirus as it may
might
bring
People to think about what kind of a world do we want?
Do we want the kind of a world that leads to this then we should think about the origins of this crisis
Why is there a cooler numbers?
Crisis, it's a colossal
market failure it goes right back to the essence of
market
Exacerbated by the neoliberal of the Savage Neil in the world the intensification of
deep social economic problems
It was known for a long time that pandemics are very likely that it was understood very well
understood that they are likely to be
coronavirus and then
also slight modifications of the SARS
epidemic
15 years ago, I
it was over compt of the
viruses were
Identified sequence to the vaccines were available
labs around the world
It could be working right then on
developing protection for potential
coronavirus and
Demyx, why did they do it?
The market signals were wrong the drug companies. We have handed over our fate
to private tyrannies old
corporations which are unaccountable to the public in this case big pharma and
for them
They taking new
Body creams is more profitable than that of finding a vaccine that that'll protect people from total destruction
Impossible for the government to step in
Going back to wartime mobilization
That's what happened
polio at the time
I can remember very well was a terrifying threat was ended by the discovery of the Salk vaccine
By a government institution set off by the Roosevelt
administration no patents
available to everyone
That could have been done this time, but the neoliberal plague has blocked that
we are living under an
Ideology from which economists have a good bit of responsibility
so it comes from the corporate sector an ideology, which is
typifies by
that Ronald Reagan
reading the script handed to by his corporate masters with his sunny smile saying
Government is the problem
Let's get rid of government. Which means
Let's hand over decisions to private tyrannies that are unaccountable to the public
on the other side of the Atlantic Thatcher was
instructing us that there is a society just
Individuals thrown into the market to survive somehow and furthermore. There is no alternative
The world has been suffering under ditch
Years, and it's now at the point where things that could be done like direct government
intervention on the spot the
invention of the soul of the Salk vaccine
But that's blocked for ideological reasons
coming out of the
neoliberal plague and the point is that this
coronavirus
Epidemic could have been prevented the information was there debris and in fact, it was well known in
October 20 19
Just before the outbreak
It was a large-scale simulation
by level simulation in the United States in the world
the possible pandemic of this kind nothing was done now the
crisis was then made worse by the
Word he is the
Treachery of the political systems. We didn't pay attention to the information that they were aware of
on December 31st
China
informed the World Health Organization of
pneumonia like symptoms with unknown etiology a week later
they
Identified some Chinese scientists identified it as a corona of a corona virus furthermore. They sequenced it
Information to the world by then
colleges others who were bothering to read World Health Organization report
Knew that they would run a virus and they knew how to deal with it. Did they do anything?
Well, yes, I'm dead the countries in the China
South Korea Taiwan Singapore began to do something and they have
Sort of pretty much teams contained at least the first surgeon crisis in
Europe to some extent that's happened a Germany which had
which had had moved the just on time that MIDI is the
Hospital systems under neoliberalism did have spare
diagnostic capacity and was able to act in
a
Highly selfish fashion not helping others
But for itself at least two other than reasonable
Containment other countries just ignored it the worst were them the United Kingdom and the worst of all was the United States
Which happens to be led by?
the
Atlantic who said as you know, one day there's no crisis. It's just like flu the next day
It's a terrible crisis and I knew it all along
The next day we have to give it for business because I have to win the election
the idea that the world is in these hands is
but pointings
started with it again a colossal market failure by pointing to
fundamental problems in the set to economic order made much worse
by the neoliberal plane and it continues because of the collapse of the kinds of
institutional structures that could deal with if they were functioning
well, these are topics that we ought to be thinking about seriously and
thinking in more depth about
As I said what kind of world we want to live in?
Overcome so now there will be options of the options range from
the installation of highly authoritarian
brutal States all the way over to
radical reconstruction
the society and more humane
Terms concerned with human needs not private profit and we should bear in mind that
Highly authoritarian
Vicious states are quite compatible with neoliberalism. In fact the Guru's of neoliberalism
from Mises and
The rest were perfectly happy with massive state violence as long as it
supported what they called sound economics
Neoliberalism has its origins in
1920s Vienna for me such a senator if I may this could barely contain his delight and the
proto-fascist of Austrian state
Smashed the labor unions an Austrian social democracy
And joined the early proto-fascist government praised it praised fascism
in fact because of his protecting sound economics when
Pinochet
installed and murders brutal dictatorship in Chile
They loved they will fought there the Reedman eye
Difficulty helped out of this marvelous miracle that was bringing sound economic
Profit to it for harness up some small part of the population. So it's not an it's not out of
Just think but savage neoliberal system
might be
reinstalled by self-proclaimed
libertarians with a powerful state violence imposing that's one
Pop's was a nightmare that might come about but not it's not it's necessary
There is the possibility
that people will
Organize come engage as many are doing and bring about a much better world
which will also confront the
enormous problems that were facing right down the road the problems of nuclear war, which is
closer than it's ever been and the problems of
Environmental
Catastrophe from which there is no recovery once we've gotten to that stage
to
Look at that. It's not far in distance. Unless we act decisively
So it's a critical moment of human history not just because of the car
but that does bring us should bring us to awareness of
the
Flaws bird flu is not strong enough a deep
dysfunctional characteristics of the whole socio-economic system which has to do
If there's going to be a survivable future
So this could be a warning sign and lesson to deal with it today
Prevent it from exploding
But thinking of its roots and how those roots are going to lead to more crises worst ones in this room
extra faith right away
And since we don't have much time I just pose one last question
Yes, so I
Think many people are interest interested and also us who are active in social movements
and
mobilizations and organized for decades using using physical and social closeness between people
But now suddenly we are all
Getting accustomed to what is now being called?
social distancing
so my question is, how do you see the future of
social resistance in times of social distance and
If this takes a few more months
Not to mention, maybe a year or two
And we are mainly in self isolation or at home
What would be your advice to?
Progressives around the world
activists also
intellectuals students workers
how to organize in this new situation and could you perhaps tell us whether you see a hope that
instead of going into a global authoritarianism
This open historic situation might go in a radical transformation of the world, which would be green
Equal just and full of solidarity
First of all, we should bear in mind
That in the past few years. There has been a form of social isolation
which is very damaging when you go into a
McDonald's and
Take a look at the bunch of teenagers
Sitting around a type table having a hamburger
What you see is two conversations going on
One sort of shallow discussion among them
Another the one that each one is having on a cellphone with some remote
individual who with friend
this is
atomized and isolated people to an extraordinary extent
the Thatcher
Principle there was no society
has
Escalated
the misuse
Social media that has turned people into very isolated creatures, especially young people
There are actually universities now United States where the side will have
Klaxon them saying look up
because
Every kid is walking around on his glued to his cell phone
That's a form of self-induced site social isolation, which has been very harmful
We're now on a situation of real social isolation
It has to be overcome by
Recreating social bonds and whatever way can be done
through
Whatever kind that can be helping people in need
contacting them
developing organizations expanding possession like before I'm getting them to be
functional and operative making plans for the future
Bringing people together as he can in the Internet age
to join
to consult at the Liberty to figure out answers to the problems that they face and
Work on them which can be done. It's not face-to-face communication, which for human beings is
essential but
It'll be deprived of it for a while. You can put it on hold find other ways and
Continue with the man in fact extend and deepen the activities carried out
Can be done it's not going to be easy but Rowan's effaced
Can you pose a question since were both in self-isolation I do longest-range appreciation
Was that before a parrot
Do we have a bird as well or a parrot or a bird? There was a sound of the work. Yes hair
the lingual parrot it can say
sovereignty to all the people in Portuguese
Greater wisdom than we hear from, Washington
Thanks a lot no, I think this is a beautiful ending
Of this conversation. I hope we do talk soon
We will all stay at home and we will wait for you and your parrot to tell us when to get out of our apartment
Sense make a revolution
