On that day, we learned that human intelligence had devised the means to bring the human experiment of 200,000 years to an end.
And with the Iraq propaganda, leaders had discovered a cynical means to terrorize its own people and force them to accept a politically motivated decision derived not from existential fears, but geopolitical ambitions and the promise of making lots of cash later.
Even now, we wait for what some of these masters of war have described as the "Pearl Harbor" event for the Internet waiting to happen. Priming the pump of fear to come -- so dependent have we become on electronic inter-networking -- that we will be ready to let Them do most anything when the next mushroom bullshit cloud hits to save us. Prepare for a series of rolling pearl harbors. Maybe they'll even put out a beer. (Stay thirsty, my friends.)
Climate Change and the pandemic are now holding the world's attention, says Chomsky, but there are three volatile regions where there exists a high danger of catastrophic human error regarding nuclear armaments. Take the Middle East. The regional instability caused by Israel's "secret" possession of nuclear arms has long concerned Chomsky. He tells the attentive crowd, "the failure to move forward on a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East imperils the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- the most important of all arms control treaties." Arguably, their failure has led to the subcontinental nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, from joining the NPT. "Protecting Israel's nuclear arsenal from inspection is evidently a high enough priority," he continues, "so it justifies a threat to the major arms control treaty." The Kashmir region between Pakistan and India continues to be a flash point.
But the real nuclear threat to the world continues to be the Cold War posturing between Russia and the USA. Chomsky refers to tension-building exercises by the US in the early 80s that he says led to several "Miracle" near-misses of all-out terminal war. Specifically, he alludes to "Operation Able Archer," a f*ck-with teasing out of the enemy's capabilities that reminds one of how the evil of a virus is drawn out in gain-of-function exercises designed to help us learn about their capabilities ahead of time so as to be ready with solutions. In the case of viruses, such research can result in early vaccines, but the risk of such research is such that potentially a pandemic could result from an "escape" from the lab of such a "Cape Fear" virus. Obama shut such research down, Trump opened it back up. In the case of teasing out the Russkies to get intel on their strategic moves when provoked, well, it could result in WWW3 and the Whimper.
Chomsky told us, "A couple of years ago, some Russian archives were declassified, and it was learned that the Russians took Able Archer very seriously." He said that "Washington understood right away that Able Archer was bringing the world to the verge of terminal war." We were sufficiently aware of this threat in the early 80s under Reagan that two films graphically depicting our nuclear self-annihilation came out -- on TV -- within six months of each other: The Day After (US, 1983) and Threads (UK, 1984). Despite the public response to these films and the pressure their newly-realized terror brought to politicians to change the posturing, America has still found it indispensable to push NATO on Ukraine, with a view to bringing nukes right to Russia's lap, despite previous assurances otherwise.
This has led one "respected" national security analyst, William Perry, to virtually throw his hands up. Chomsky says,
William Perry has warned, in his words, that "we are facing nuclear dangers today that are in fact more likely to erupt into a nuclear conflict than during the Cold War."
Given the nuclear near-misses Chomsky outlines, and the anthropocentric crises we face, this is un-sobering, unsettling, and unbelievable. During the Reagan era, the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock moved to Three Minutes before midnight. That's scary.
And when Chomsky's lecture moves into Climate Change he doesn't sugar coat the shituation (h/t Peter Tosh) with cliches: The Sixth Mass Extinction is here. And what have we done to adjust to it, mitigate or change our behavior? If anything, he believes some of us have gone out of our way to make things worse, almost as if out of spite. He is especially contemptuous of the Republican Party. Citing their climate denial behavior, which has led to fracking and more oil production, at a time when it's crucial we pull back, Chomsky tells us all,
When you consider the stakes, it's a fair question whether there has ever been a more dangerous organization in human history than today's Republican Party...][They have totally ignored] the most critical questions that have ever arisen in human history - questions of literal survival in the short term. This is amazing blindness as the lemmings march to the precipice!
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