When Barcelona fell, there was a huge flood of refugees from Spain. Most went to Mexico, about 40,000. Some went to New York City, established anarchist offices in Union Square, secondhand bookstores down 4th Avenue. That's where I got my early political education, roaming around that area. That's 80 years ago. Now it's today.
Once he got his first intellectual joyride in a souped-up vehicle under his belt, he became the rebel cause ce'là ¨bre he is today, constantly reminding us of how close we are to the precipice of Anthropocentric doom. We want to jump out of Big Oil, but our cuff is caught on the door handle. Cue the pulsing violins. "Three minutes to Doom," says Chomsky (actually, not to be pedantic, but it's now - gulp -- 100 seconds to Doom).
Internationalism or Extinction is less a book than a kit or package of materials. The short book (119 pages) is essentially based on a lecture (see video embedded above) he gave just before the 2016 presidential election at the Old South Church in Boston. There are five chapters that outline the threats we face as a species now (Climate Change, Nuclear War, the erosion of Democracy) and in addition the familiar disillusionments traced in his speech, he follows with a short interview with Shawn Wallace (My Dinner with Andre), an Ask-and-Answer with community activists, a roundtable with the books editors, and updated reflections at the end of Trump's tenure in office. And tools -- research resources, lists, books to read -- offered up to the newbie shitgiver or journeyman intellectual unfamiliar with the Public Intellectual's work.
Chomsky's lecture -- referred to by the editors as a "Chomsky Event" -- covers a lot of the same ground he's publicly poked at before. Chomsky didn't meander much, as he is sometimes wont to do, raging, as he now is, against the dying of his light, and he talked about the continuing threat of nuclear proliferation, citing the continuing Cold War saga with Russia, and Israel's refusal to allow nuke inspectors; the role of the Republican party in the Climate Change debacle; and the erosion of Democracy and the growing collective awareness that we are entering what Chomsky referred to as The Sixth Extinction, when the sh*t Hits the Fan. It's a grim talk from a wizened old man who isn't in the mood to pull punches. However, on that front at least, he's mercifully succinct.
Chomsky recalls for us that we are in our 75th year of nuclear proliferation, and that, almost counterintuitively, given our understanding of their existential threat, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (providing an opportunity to step back from the brink), we are closer to nuclear disaster than ever before. Chomsky begins the lecture with this sober thought:
Extinction and internationalism have been linked in a fateful embrace ever since the moment when the threat of extinction became an all too realistic concern, August 6th, 1945.
He is referring to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima that leveled the city and brought hundreds of thousands of casualties -- on the day, and in cancers later.
Most of the young adults sitting in the Old South church pews, many of them millennials who've grown up as the first American generation to be under the soft thumb of the Surveillance State and its dystopian panopticon, don't have those chilling memories that most Earthlings had, back in 1945, when they saw those replayed mushrooms clouds rise into the sky on TV. Poor millennials have had to settle for the inexplicable scenes of horror and the aftermath of 9/11 to partially understand the terror wrought by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. They have heard an older generation refer to the Manhattan event on 9/11 as a new Pearl Harbor. Hmph.
Such millennials -- and so many other truly brainwashed citizens -- have had to find themselves conned by their own government, such as when US leaders became war criminals by presenting false evidence before the public on TV during the lead-up to the Gulf War in 2003, including Condoleeza Rice's disingenuous and criminal allusion to not wanting "the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" before acting against the danger that Saddam Hussein and Iraq represented, a colluders with al Qaeda.
For Chomsky, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were yet another example of our hegemonic apostasy. He adds,
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