Noam Chomsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…On nuclear war, what has been your opinion of the doctrines of Thomas Schelling? It’s okay. At an abstract level, yes, you can talk about these things. Fact of the matter is that even contemplating the possibility of nuclear war is insane, literally insane. There cannot be a nuclear war between major powers. The country that launches a first strike will be destroyed, even if there’s no retaliatory strike, just from the effects of nuclear winter. There’s a lot of casual talk about these things, and Schelling can carry out his game theoretical analyses and so on. But the basic point is, every step has to be taken to ensure that there is no possibility of this happening. There are people who understand that, people like former Defense Secretary William Perry, for example. He spent his whole life in the nuclear establishment in the state system. He says he’s terrified, doubly terrified. Terrified once because we’re racing toward disaster day by day. Doubly terrified because there’s no attention being given to it. Sometimes it’s just astonishing. The Pew polling agency, a couple of weeks ago, came out with . . . They give regular studies of public attitudes on all sorts of things, very valuable. The latest one, they gave people a couple of dozen choices of issues and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Nuclear war was not even on the list. Climate change was on the list. It was ranked at the bottom of the 21 choices. That’s manufacture of consent in a form which is going to destroy us all. Why does the whole left libertarian tradition, at least to me, seem to be so weak today? If I mention Rudolf Rocker to someone, the chance they have heard of him is extremely small. I’m sure you experience the same. Maybe they’ve heard of him because they’ve read your writings, but to have heard of him separately? That hardly ever happens. The New Left of the 1960s mostly has vanished. How and why did that happen?…

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