 Michael Sukoff, I'm your host for Thinking It Through, a new bi-weekly show devoted to thinking about and discussing important issues and problems in the local, national, and international news. So welcome everybody. For my first guess of this show, I wanna welcome George Howlin Jr. George is a longtime friend of mine in the interest of full disclosure. He's also a journalist, a father, and he has worked in the field of journalism for a number of years, including radio commentary, print journalism, and I will let him say whatever else he wants to say about himself. Welcome George, welcome to Thinking It Through. Thank you Mike, it's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited about this. First in a series of what I hope will be dialogues with activists and others. As I said, this episode's discussion features George Howlin, who is also, if I'm not stretching it too much, George, a former activist. Yeah, very much so. Thank you, and we'll get into a little bit more of that as the show proceeds. So in this half hour show, we hope to engage in a free falling dialogue concerning two of the major existential threats humanity is currently facing. The climate crisis and Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. And our discussion aims to explore answers to the following questions. Number one, what is critical thinking? What does it mean to think critically? And I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment. Number two, what are some different ways in which people think about the two issues that I've mentioned? And what are some of the assumptions underlying the way that people think about these issues? And thirdly, how would one think about these issues critically? So I just wanna say a little bit more about the philosophy behind thinking it through. There are many complicated and difficult issues to wrap one's brain around in the world today. And we have so much information coming at us from so many different directions. But what we often don't have the time to do is not only hear or read what's coming at us, but to try and examine exactly what's being said and what are the assumptions underlying what's not being said. And to do that from a critical standpoint, by which I mean, number one, listening very carefully, identify some underlying themes and what the person or person's account of the issue that they're describing is. And to try and look a little deeper at those underlying assumptions about how those persons or people are understanding that issue. So in other words, the takeaway of this show is I wanna help all of us to begin to learn how to think critically about contentious issues in the world today. And I believe that this is one of the most important skills we can have as American as well as world citizens. So George, I'm not exactly sure because we didn't get a chance to talk live before we went on air, but is there anything else or more you'd like to say about yourself, your background, or even what might be of interest to you in talking about during our conversation today? Well, I have started out my political involvement in my teens working against the war in Vietnam. And I also became very involved in anti-nuclear energy and anti-nuclear weapons activism in my 20s. And I found it very hard to move forward in the world with this great existential threat that we face in terms of nuclear weapons. And now of course, in the last, and even at that time, we were aware that we were on a terrible trajectory in terms of the environment and the destruction of the biosphere. And that of course has become even more acute in the last 10 years as we have begun to learn about climate change and begun to see the real effects of it. Great, George. Well, I just want to add a little bit by way of background. George and I have known each other since 1981. And what's very interesting and led me to be so excited about having you on today as a guest, George, is that I also, going back even earlier than 1981, I was very concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. And George and I met, I won't go into the details because we don't have time, but we formed a support group around discussion and supporting each other around what to do in facing these kinds of global threats. And as you correctly mentioned, George, the focus at that time for us and also in the major mainstream media was the nuclear threat. You had a huge military buildup, nuclear weapons buildup between the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. And so you and I, George and I came together around trying to get a handle in a group setting about, first of all, how do we take in what's going on in the world and how does that affect us as individuals as well as as a group? So you have anything else you wanna add to what I said, George? Well, I think you summarized it very well. Well, thank you. So I wanna move into the specific issues that we identified at the top of this broadcast, the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine. And as we continue with what I hope will be a dialogue, we would like to highlight the differences as well as the connections between these two issues. So, George, what would you say about the way that you think about the nuclear weapons issue that is either similar to or different from when we first met? The biggest development in nuclear weapons in the last 30 years has been, of course, the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War that was being fought between the United States and the Soviet Union threatened the entire biosphere and potentially could kill off humanity altogether. This mutually assured destruction of mad that the Soviets and the Americans were pursuing eventually turned into a really mobilizing issue for a whole generation of activists. Can I interrupt you for a second? Just in the interest of time, I'm more interested right now in how you're thinking about the issue has changed. And let me just add before you go on that I'm bringing this issue in kind of through the back door and it wasn't one of the two issues that we identified at the top. But the reason why we thought this was such an important issue to bring up because the Russian war and intervention in Ukraine has brought front and center the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons. Things should really go in an even worse direction than they've already been going. So I'm sorry, go ahead, George. So with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, there was hope on the part of many people around the world that maybe the nuclear arms race could finally end. And we could undertake the end of the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and the production of more and more and more. Unfortunately, that didn't happen both because of the unwillingness of the United States to engage in any kind of real anti-nuclear diplomacy under Republican and Democratic administrations. And then of course, the development of a very authoritarian system in Russia that eventually gave rise to Vladimir Putin and his complete lack of interest in any kind of nuclear negotiations. As he has pursued the strategy of intense aggression against Ukraine, as you said, we're now back to one minute to midnight again. That was something that the Union of Concerned Sciences did with the nuclear clock throughout the Cold War pointing out that we were in great danger. And that danger continues today. And how would you say that your perspective on this issue as you just summarized it, your way of thinking through the issue compares with or is different from, say the coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine right now? Because what I'd like us to get at is what are some of the assumptions behind the way you and I, we, you and myself or even the news media portray what's going on in the war, the Russian war against Ukraine, for example. Do you see any differences there? And what I'm trying to get at is in the short time we have, what does it mean to think critically about any kind of issue, whether it's the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the danger of nuclear confrontation. What does it mean to sort of question the way the issues are maybe being presented to us, either through the media, through the words of Joe Biden or through an anti-nuclear activist, for example. Well, Mike, it sounds like to me, maybe that you haven't answered that question more than me. Well, go for it. Yeah, well, I'm, I don't want to, what I want to do is engage in a dialogue around this. Now, I will say a little bit more and maybe that'll help to move our conversation forward. On the issue of Ukraine, for example, most of the mainstream news media coverage and I'm talking about CNN, MSNBC, even the PBS NewsHour, all of the major news outlets through which people in this country and even abroad get their quote, news unquote. There seem to be certain assumptions that are built in to the way they're these issues are being presented. For example, the question, and I do not at all condone Putin's horrible invasion and war against the Ukrainian people. This is absolutely inexcusable. These are war crimes. But what the question, one question that doesn't get asked very much, if at all, in my observation of the media is how did we get to this point? How did we get to this point? And what's often not talked about is that at the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the former Soviet Union, there were discussions between. I guess at that point, it would have been, you know, the newly forming Russian government and the NATO countries, including the US around what to do with Germany. Because Germany was divided into East and West Germany. And there's a whole history to that, which we don't have time to go into. But as a condition of allowing Germany to become one country, the NATO countries, including the US, verbally agreed that NATO would not expand one inch further east. Now, that seems to be completely. Maybe not forgotten. I mean, there are people who know this. But when stories about Ukraine, even background stories about how did this transpire? This is rarely mentioned. If at all. So what I'm interested in doing and having a dialogue around this on this show is to start asking some of these I don't know what you call them, deeper questions or critical questions, because a lot of the that I see of the limitations of our largely corporate news media is they don't give us a historical context for understanding what's going on. So that would be one aspect of thinking critically, in my humble opinion, would be to ask questions about, well, how did we get here in the first place? And what are these assumptions? I guess in this case, the assumption would be. It doesn't really matter what happened up until. Very recently. Because it's not getting. It's not getting talked about largely. So, so this is part of the. And the other thing I mean by thinking critically is mean then going to the root of a problem. Okay. Now, the word radical is a very problematic term because the way it's used in in everyday language and including the corporate media does not reflect its original meeting. The the word radical originally came from the Latin word radicalis, which means going to the root of something. Which means going to the root of something. So I think being able to think critically involves going to the root of an issue. And that's what I think is sorely missing in our in our corporate news culture and even in in everyday life. What do you think about any of that? It's interesting. Of course, we have a situation where historically Russia has felt very vulnerable to the United States and NATO and has reacted defensively because of that. And that really shows the lack of diplomacy that the United States has been able to engage in. But of course, the other side of it is, is that who knows if Putin would have been interested in any kind of diplomacy. I mean, you know, he's interested in a completely totalitarian society that he controls with tremendous wealth being cut up among his oligarchs, his friends, his circle. Kind of a kleptocracy where the government exploits the people and the environment in order to enrich themselves. And the United States, of course, our political system has not put hardly any emphasis on opening dialogue and real negotiations with Russia. They've been cast in the mode of the Soviet Union, of the bad guys ever since the beginning of the Cold War and the end of World War II. And it's a very frustrating situation where the people of the world are being held hostage to superpowers, neither of which has any interest in dismantling militarism and getting serious about ensuring the security of the majority of the people in both countries through reaching out and making real concessions to one another and starting down the path of mutual disarmament. Yeah, I just want to mention our time, the end of this program is fast approaching. I think we've got about 10 minutes left, something like that. So I want to quickly turn to the other issue that we identified as something that might be good to dialogue around. And of course, it's impossible to do justice even to one of these issues in 30 minutes. But anyway, you may know that there was a UN report today that came out that warned that humanity has less than three years to slash greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half in order to prevent the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis. Now, this is not really news. Every six months to a year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come out with reports like this with increasingly grim predictions if the world's major industrial powers don't take steps very quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But I guess what I'm wondering on a kind of issue like this as with the nuclear weapons threat of the early to mid 1980s, these reports. And in this case, this report is the consensus of the world's majority of the world's climate scientists telling us, look, if governments don't act now to take what would be drastic steps to reduce carbon emissions, it's going to be game over for the climate. And similarly, during the years of the nuclear weapons proliferation and the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union, humanity was at that point on the brink of a different kind of catastrophe. So I guess my question is what's missing with this picture? How is it that these reports can come out and leaders of major industrial nations like the US, like Russia, like Great Britain can acknowledge these scientific findings and same thing with our news media, but yet nothing changes. And so how do we under what what's wrong with this picture? I'm wondering about your thoughts on that. In terms of climate change, while the science is very clear, science doesn't make policy in the United States and in other major industrial countries around the world. Our political system is, of course, completely and totally rotten due to the huge amounts of corporate cash that control our political parties, Republican and Democrat. Climate change flies in the face, of course, of the petroleum industry and it is one of the major lobbies in the United States, one of the most powerful group of businesses that controls how our politicians behave and they show no inclination to come forward and do anything meaningful about it. I will give Joe Biden credit that in his budget he did try to begin the so-called Green Revolution of switching away from fossil fuels, but his efforts were met with stonewalling by the Republicans, apathy by the general public and mostly silence by the Democrats. Thank you, George. We're going to have to wrap up this conversation but I guess the last thing I want to raise for our and our listeners and viewers consideration is given the enormity of these dangers and the way they're being presented to us, how can we as not only activists but critical citizens think critically about these issues so that we can feel like we can have a say in what happens with the future of this planet? I don't expect you to have an answer to that but I at least want to raise the question. Right now my view is 73 million people voted for Donald Trump in the last elections and we're barely holding on to the basic democratic norms that we have. The idea that we're going to launch a people's revolution against climate change I don't see it happening anytime soon. Well on that somewhat pessimistic. Oh I'm extremely pessimistic. Yeah I want to thank you George. George Helen Jr is a father, a journalist. He's been a political commentator and an activist and George I want to thank you so much for being on Thinking It Through. I hope we can have you back at some point. And thank you all for watching and listening. If you'd like to share any comments or questions about the show you can reach me see if I can remember my new email address. I think it would be my last name Sukhoff, S-U-K-H-O-V at Hawaii-H-A-W-A-I dot E-D-U Sukhoff at Hawaii dot E-D-U. Thanks again for joining us and we look forward to seeing you again here next time. Mahalo.