No doubt many of you have seen or read this interview so I add a link to it here for latecomers. It pretty well sums up the most critical moment in the past few thousand years of human history.
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There have been many other such times in human history. After reading the Vatican’s agreement with Hitler in their Reichskonkordat of September 1933 which gave that monster the green light while they supervised the terrible destruction of lives and families I would put that on the top of the list. How do we know the Vatican were still playing “Nero”? One only has to look at the records of the extirmination camps which were run by the Vatican during WW2 and as happened at Jasenovac had Sadistic Franciscan Priests organising the killings – even horrified hardened Nazi’s when they sawed the heads off living victims – majority being Orthodox Christians who refused to convert.
What was even worse was that they only ever brought Archbishop Stepinac to the War Crimes Trials and let him off with a simple 16 years, with home imprisonment after 5 years.
Millenarians: Trumping (sic) the end of the world since at least the third century BC. Heads up, ‘heroes’ : WE’RE STILL HERE.
It’s just like I said before in my last reply: Chomsky is the one driving all opinion on the Far Left. Now, I love Chomsky. He is probably the only Leftist commentator to put the appropriate amount of serious concern on the topic of climate change. In this he goes a little too far to say it is going to destroy all life on the planet, but I much prefer that overstatement to the typical Liberal understatement that climate change is something we should be slightly concerned about, but not as concerned about as Trump’s racism. Even though I don’t think all conscious existence would end, I do think climate change does have a good enough chance of ending or severely inhibiting the continuation of human civilization such that we need to be treating it like Dick Cheney’s quip about terrorism: “If there is a 1% chance, then we need to take it is as a certainty.” That is why I think you should hold more concern for Assange being freed in order to help in this civilization-ending endeavor rather than concern yourself over his right to continue his “journalistic” assault on scientific reason unhindered.
Chomsky unfortunately adds another political topic that he believes is just as if not more important than climate change: scaling back nuclear weapons on Russia’s border. His dismissal of Russian hacking as something that isn’t really important makes me think that he is taking the deescalation of NATO missile defense to Russia’ border from the Clinton era to be the greater threat than Russia undermining the global effort to curb carbon releases. Putin is not going to reflexively nuke the U.S. over a decision NATO made 30 years ago that didn’t even break any treaties. If the world ends in a nuclear explosion, it is probably going to be over some random accident that has nothing to do with where the NATO defense borders are, or it is going to be over a war for dwindling resources caused by climate change. Giving Putin exactly what he wanted for hacking the U.S. is only going to make him more aggressive, which is more likely to ultimately end in a scenario where he either manages to tilt the American vote to climate catastrophe or cause a military reaction that has a far greater chance of causing nuclear annihilation than where our nukes happen to be stationed. Chomsky even talks as if verbal agreements should be just as good between two superpowers, which is preposterous. Considering the U.S. role in election interference in favor of Yeltsin is ultimately what gave Putin his route to power, I don’t consider Putin hacking the U.S. to be a 30-year-delayed tit-for-tat fair retaliation.
I did not hear him say climate change was going to destroy all life on the planet. I believe I used his actual words in the title — “organized human life”.
I’m not sure where you get the other “things Chomsky says” from either. Nor do I know the grounds for your apparent view that Putin is on some sort of “aggression” policy. Would appreciate actual quotations and specific sources that are the grounds for the views expressed.
In your video he says, “Hitler did not intend to destroy the prospects for human existence.” In the link below, he suggests that there will only be insects left on the planet after Republican work is through. But you are also correct that the other references he has made are more correct in saying it will end “organized life” or will “end human civilization”. Let me make myself clear: I was not really criticizing him at all for saying that. I was just kind of joking that even though there is a difference between human extinction and the end of civilization, they are both so unthinkably catastrophic that we really should just go ahead and consider the two to be the same thing in terms of how we react to it. With that in mind, I completely agree with Chomsky’s statement that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. That’s why I said he is the only political commentator that agrees with my concept of how dangerous climate change is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJtfWZGxnGI
Here is Chomsky saying we need to pull back the NATO borders:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXNGirQWiCw
Here is Chomsky saying the Russian hacking is “marginal” and that Trump is “perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia” because of the threat of nuclear war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6qk01yq-dY&feature=share
As for Putin being aggressive, go back and read my comments on your Assange posts. 12 Russians have been indicted for breaking into the email account. They also hacked into the registration rolls, which is NOT something the U.S. has been accused of doing when Clinton helped get Yeltsin elected. The hackers that created the ClimateGate controversy, which was the crowning moment for the modern Climate Denial movement that could ultimately destroy human civilization, also came from Russia. This shouldn’t be hard to figure out why. Russia’s is a Petro-state. It’s entire depressed economy is based on oil.
Appreciate the reply.
It was the details about Russian aggression that I was particularly thinking of. The only cases I can think of are Georgia and Crimea and support for forces in western Ukraine, each one of which have what to me are very obvious national-defensive-self-interest motives. Nato has indeed been threatening Russia by expanding right up to its very borders even indicating that Ukraine may become a member. As Chomsky himself says, how could the US ever tolerate Russian bases being sprinkled across Canada and Mexico!
As an outsider I do find myself rolling eyes at the outrage expressed in the US over Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It is common knowledge that the US goes all out to influence the elections of other countries — note, e.g., Ukraine itself — and where propaganda and financial assistance fail a coup or war is often not far off as a Plan B.
Meanwhile, as per Chomsky again, the US allows a foreign head of state to address Congress without the permission of the President to sway the US to embrace the foreign nation’s policy towards Iran; it accepts a democratic system where the outcome of elections can be predicted by money spent (i.e. where elections are bought); where legislation is framed by lobbyists and the representatives do not on the whole represent the actual aspirations of those who elected them. To be outraged by Russia in the face of all the above does seem to be a misconstrual of priorities. I find it hard to know where Chomsky’s analysis is wrong or unbalanced.
I am not asking you to be outraged that Russia would interfere in an election when the U.S. has interfered so much and with other countries. I am asking you to be outraged that they appear to be trying to hack an election in order to sabotage the Paris Agreement which will ultimately destroy the only viable atmosphere this planet has.
I consider hacking into the voter rolls to be aggression against the right of democratic self-determination, such as the flawed college voting system allows for democracy. I completely understand and respect your opinion that NATO went too far with its borders during the Clinton Era, but is it really such an emergency that we have to fix that issue right now, with Trump as president, who is also trying to break up the EU in other ways? That’s the part I’m just not getting.
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s just say Assange was released, NATO pulls back, and Bernie runs for president. Then at the next presidential election, Assange does the exact same thing and releases hacked emails about Bernie’s wife causing the university she worked at to foreclose. Trump wins again, but then we find out the Russians have put ten times the effort into breaking into the U.S. voting system and this time there is a much larger suspicion that they might have changed some votes electronically. Trump then allies himself even more with Israel and Saudi Arabia and takes an even more aggressive stance against Iran and the Sudan. Climate talks are put off for another four years as Trump continues subsidizing coal. Should we then start doing something about Russia or would you still be saying that the Democrats just have to go further left on their platform?
I lately read the book “The Limits to Growth”. It is very scary. Either way civilization will collapse because of dwindling recources or pollution and environmental destruction. They predict it will certainly happen this century. Likely, the world population will start to decline approximately from 2030 onwards, because of falling crop yields.
The awful thing is, there is no easy fix. We are too late.
It all makes me think that worrying about Islam, terrorism and war makes no sense. These are minor issues.
According to Dennis Meadows, one of the writers of the report, climate change is not a problem, it is a symptom of exponential growth.