Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)
Building on a friendship initiated in Sandinista Nicaragua of the 1980s, Wallace Shawn - a committed activist but someone who is best known as an accomplished dramatist and actor - interviewed scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky. In their discussion, Shawn reflected on Chomsky’s words and called on him to address the ever-challenging question: how do we convince the people who were not in the room to care, to take action, given the scope and urgency of our current political crises? The following transcript is excerpted from their conversation, which can be read in full in Internationalism or Extinction, edited by Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar and Paul Shannon.
WALLACE SHAWN: Many
of the people who do know about the consequences of nuclear war and climate
change are quite well-educated people who are resented by a lot of people. Do
you have any thoughts on how, I mean there is a class difference that Trump
supporters who laugh at the idea of global warming and climate change have a
built-in resentment toward people who’ve been well educated and who may be
better off economically. How do we reach them?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s serious. That is a very interesting
phenomenon; it has to be dealt with sensitively and with understanding. As I
mentioned, 40% of the population say it can’t be a problem because of the Second Coming. Now that’s a deep cultural
problem in the United States. People who know something about US history should
all… we should all understand it. It’s very important to
realize that this country was a cultural backwater until World War II. [Until
then,] if you wanted to study physics, you went to Germany. You wanted to
become a writer, an artist, you went to Paris. There were exceptions of course but
it was over-whelmingly true, and it was true even though the United States was
far and away the richest, most powerful country in the world and had been for a
long time. [There are] all kinds of historical reasons for that: it’s a very
insular country.
There aren’t many countries where you can travel 3,000 miles
and be in about the same place where you left, not running into any different
culture or language or anything like that. Protected by oceans, we keep away
from those bad guys, enormous internal resources which nobody else had. There
were a lot of waves of immigrants that became integrated and so on, so there
are a lot of reasons for it, but it’s there and you can’t ignore it. You can’t
ignore it, and there is no point railing about atheism. These are issues that
have to be understood, and it has to be understood that the churches really
mean something to people, plenty of people, including the Trump supporters….read more:
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