 Welcome to another world after coronavirus. I am really happy and honored for this special episode, because there is a special guest joining us today. And that special guest is not only mine, but a hero of many generations. Both of us are unfortunately in self-isolation, so this is also a very special occasion. But without further introduction, I think most of you who are watching this know who is Noam Chomsky. And I'm so glad that Noam is joining us today. Hello, Noam. Could you just tell us where are you? Are you already in self-isolation and for how long? Well, I'm in Tucson, Arizona, in so far so good the time. So you were born in 1928. And you wrote your first essay, as far as I know, when you were only 10 years old, which was an essay on the Spanish Civil War, actually just after the fall of Barcelona. And so that was 1938, which looks very far away for my generation. You survived the Second World War, Hiroshima, I mean, you were a witness to Hiroshima. You were a witness to many very big, important political historic events, from the Vietnam War to the oil crisis, to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Before that, you were a witness to Chernobyl. After that, in the 90s, you were a witness to a historical moment which was leading to 9-11, which was also a global event. And most recently, I mean, I'm trying to really shorten a long history and a lifetime of someone like you, but the most recent event was the financial crash of 2007 and 2008. So in this background of such a rich life and being a witness and also an actor in these major historical processes, how do you look at the current coronavirus crisis? Is it an unprecedented historical event? Is it something which surprised you and how do you look at it? That would be my question. Well, I should say that my earliest memories which are haunting me now are from the 1930s. The article that you mentioned on the fall of Barcelona was actually mainly about the apparently inexorable spread of the fascist plague all over Europe and where it was gonna end. I later, much later discovered when internal documents came out that the analysts of the U.S. government at the time and the following years expected that the war would end with the war was coming, that the war would end with the world divided into a U.S. dominated Arab region and a German dominated region. So my childhood fears were not entirely out of place and those memories come back now. I can recall when I was a child, young child listening to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies over the radio. I couldn't understand the words but you could easily understand the moves and the threat and so on. And I have to say when I listened to Donald Trump's rallies today, it resonates. It's not that he's a fascist, he doesn't have that much of an ideology, he says sociopath but an individual concerned with himself but the mood and the fear is similar and the idea that the fate of the country and the world is in the hands of a sociopathic buffoon is choppy. The coronavirus is serious enough but it's worth recalling that there's a much greater horror approaching. We are racing to the edge of disaster far worse than anything that's happened in human history and Donald Trump and his millions are in the lead in racing to the abyss. In fact, there are two immense threats that we're facing. One is the growing threat of nuclear war which has exacerbated by tearing for its left of the arms control regime. The other of course is the growing threat of global warming. Both threats can be dealt with. There isn't a lot of time and the coronavirus is a horrible plague can have terrifying consequences but there will be recovery. The others, they won't be recovered. It's finished. If we don't deal with them, we're done. And so the childhood memories are coming back to haunt the different dimension threat of nuclear war. You can get a sense of where the world really is by looking to early this January as after, you know, every year the doomsday clock is set with the minute hand a certain distance from midnight which means termination. Ever since Trump was elected, the minute hand has been moving closer and closer to midnight. Last year it was two minutes to midnight. The highest, matching the highest it ever reached. This year, the analysts dispensed with minutes started moving to seconds, 100 seconds to midnight. That's the closest it's ever been. Sighting three things. The threat of nuclear war, threat of global warming and the deterioration of democracy which doesn't quite belong to you, but it does because that's the one me hope that we have for overcoming the crisis and informed, involved public taking control of their fate. If that doesn't happen, we're doomed. If we're leaving our fate to sociopathic buffoons, we're finished, that's it. And that's coming close. Trump is the worst, but that's because of US power which is a well-known talk about US decline, but you just look at the world, you don't see that. When the US imposes sanctions, murderers, devastating sanctions, it's the only country that can do that. Everyone has to follow. Europe may not like, in fact, sanctions on Iran, but they have to follow. They have to follow the master or else they're kicked out of the international financial system. Now that's not a law of nature. It's a decision in Europe to be subordinate to the master in Washington. Other countries don't even have the choice. And back to the coronavirus, one of the most shocking, harsh aspects of it is the use of sanctions to maximize the pain, perfectly consciously. Iran is in its own enormous internal problems, but by the stranglehold of tightening sanctions, which are consciously designed openly to make the sufferer and suffer bitterly now. Cuba has been suffering from it from the moment that it gained independence, but astonishing that they've survived, that they stay resilient. And one of the most ironic elements of today's coronavirus is the fact that this coronavirus crisis is that Cuba is helping Europe. I mean, this is so shocking that you don't know how to describe it. That Germany can't help Greece, but Cuba can help European countries. If you stop to think about what that means of our civil words fail, that just as when you see thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean fleeing countries, that Europe has devastated for centuries and being sent to the deaths in the Mediterranean, you don't know what words to use. The crisis, the civilizational crisis of the West at this point is devastating to think about. And it does bring up childhood memories of listening to Hitler raving on the radio to raucous crowds at the door and at the door of the rallies. We wonder if this species is even viable. You mentioned the crisis of democracy. At this moment, I think we find ourselves also in a historically unprecedented situation in the sense that almost two billion people, that's a figure I found today, are in one or the other way confined at home. Whether it is isolation, self-isolation or quarantine, almost two billion people in the world are at home. If they're lucky enough to have a home. At the same time, what we can witness is that Europe, but also other countries closed their borders, not only internal ones, but outer borders. There is an estate of exception in all the countries we can think of, which means curfew in many countries, such as France, Serbia, Spain, Italy and other countries, army on the streets. And what I want to ask you as a linguist is the language, which is now circulating around. If you listen, not just to Donald Trump, if you listen to Macron, also some other European politicians, you will constantly hear that they speak about war. And even the media speak about doctors who are on the first front line. And the virus is called an enemy, which reminded me, of course, also not to childhood memories, luckily, but a book which was written at that time, Viktor Klamperer, Lingva Terci in Peri, the book which is a book about the language of the Third Reich and in which way through language, the ideology was imposed. So from your perspective, what does this discourse about war tell us? Why do they present a virus as an enemy? Is it just to legitimize the new state of exception or is there something deeper in this discourse? In this case, I don't think it's rhetoric, but I think it's not exaggerate, it has some significance. The meaning is that if we want to deal with the crisis, we have to move to something like wartime mobilization. So if you think of a rich country like the United States, it has the resources to overcome the immediate economic crisis. Mobilization for the Second World War led the country into far greater debt than is contemplated today and was a very successful mobilization, practically quadrupled the US manufacturing and the depression, left the country with a debt but a capacity to grow. That's a lesson we need, probably not on that scale. It's not like the Second World War, but we need the mentality of a social to try to overcome the short run crisis which is severe. How severe we can recall the swine flu epidemic in 2009, which originated in the US. A couple hundred thousand people in the first society recovered from worse, but it has to be dealt with. That's a rich country like the United States. Those two billion people, the majority are in India. What happens for India, the wing and the mouth who's isolated, stars to death? What's gonna happen in a civilized world? The rich countries would be giving assistance to those who are in need instead of strangling them which is what we're doing, particularly in India but in much of the world. But the crisis, whether the crisis can be within a country like India, I don't know, bear in mind that with current tendencies if they persist, South Asia is gonna be unlivable in a decade that the temperature reached 50 degrees C in Rajasthan this summer and it's increasing. The water's running out, if it could get even worse, there's two nuclear powers there who are gonna be fighting over restricted and reduced water supplies. The coronavirus is very serious. We can't underestimate it, but we have to remember that it's a fraction, small fraction of major crises that are coming along. They may not disrupt life to the extent that the coronavirus does today, but they will disrupt life to the point of making the species unsurvivable and not in the very distant future. So we have many problems to deal with. Immediate ones, coronavirus is serious, has to be dealt with, and much larger ones, vastly larger ones, are looming. And there is a civilizational crisis. We have to, it's a time when possibly good side of the coronavirus is it may might bring people to think about what kind of a world do we want? Do we want the kind of a world that leads to this? And we should think about the origins of this crisis. Why is there a coronavirus crisis? It's a colossal market failure that goes right back to the essence of markets, exacerbated by the neoliberal, the savage neoliberal intensification of deep social economic problems. It was known for a long time that pandemics are very likely, and it was understood, very well understood, that they are likely to be coronavirus. Pandemics have slight modifications of these SARS epidemic 15 years ago. It was overcome. The viruses were identified, sequenced, the vaccines were available, labs around the world could be working right then on developing protection for potential coronavirus pandemics. Why did they do it? The market signals were wrong. The drug companies we have handed over our fate to private tyrannies called corporations which are unaccountable to the public, in this case, big pharma. And for them, making new body creams is more profitable than finding a vaccine that will protect people from total disruption. It would have been possible for the government to step in, going back to wartime mobilization. That's what happened. Polio at the time, I can remember very well, was a terrifying threat. It was ended by the discovery of the SWAC vaccine by a government institution set up by the Roosevelt administration. No patents available to everyone. That could have been done this time, but the neoliberal plague has blocked that. We are living under an ideology for which economists have a good bit of responsibility that comes from the court protector. An ideology which is typified by Ronald Reagan reading the script handed to by his corporate masters with his sunny smile saying, government is the problem. Let's get rid of government, which means let's hand over decisions to private tyrannies that are unaccountable to the public. On the other side of the Atlantic, Thatcher was instructing us that there is society, just individuals thrown into the market to survive somehow. And furthermore, there is no alternative. The world has been suffering under these years. And it's now at the point where things that could be done like direct government intervention on the scope of the invention of the Salk vaccine, but that's blocked for ideological reasons coming out of the neoliberal plague. The point is that this coronavirus epidemic could have been prevented. The information was there to prevent it. And in fact, it was well known in October 2019, just before the outbreak. There was a large-scale simulation, high-level simulation in the United States in the world of the possible pandemic of this kind. Nothing was done, the crisis was then made worse by the, I don't know what word he used, the treachery of the political systems. We didn't pay attention to the information that they were aware of. On December 31st, China informed the World Health Organization of pneumonia like symptoms with unknown etiology. A week later, the identified, some Chinese scientists identified it as a coronavirus. Furthermore, they sequenced it and purified the nation to the world. By then, virologists, others who were bothering to read World Health Organization report knew that they were coronavirus and they knew how to deal with it. Did they do anything? Well, yes, some did. The countries in the China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore began to do something. And they have sort of pretty much, it seems, contained at least the first surge of the crisis. In Europe, to some extent, it's happened. Germany, which hadn't moved to the just on time that it is the hospital systems under neoliberalism did have spare diagnostic capacity and was able to act in a highly selfish fashion, not helping others, but for itself at least to have a reasonable containment. Other countries just ignored it. The worst were the United Kingdom and the worst of all was the United States, which happens to be led by the pathogenetic who says, you know, one day there's no crisis, it's just like flu, the next day it's a terrible crisis and I knew it all along. The next day we have to go back to business because I have to win the election. The idea that the world is in these hands is tracking but the point is that it started with again a colossal market failure pointing to fundamental problems in the socioeconomic order made much worse by the neoliberal plague. And it continues because of the collapse of the kinds of institutional structures that could deal with it if they were functioning. These are topics that we ought to be thinking about seriously and thinking in more depth about, as I said, what kind of world do we want to live in? We'll overcome so now there will be options the options range from an installation of highly authoritarian, brutal states all the way over to radical reconstruction of society and more humane terms concerned with human needs and private profit. And we should bear in mind that highly authoritarian vicious states are quite compatible with neoliberalism. In fact, the gurus of neoliberalism from Mises and Hayek, the rest were perfectly happy with massive state violence as long as it supported what they called sound economics. Neoliberalism has its origins in 1920s Vienna from Mises's seminar. And Mises could barely contain his delight in the proto-fascist Austrian state and smashed the labor unions and Austrian social democracy and enjoying the early proto-fascist government and praised it, praised fascism in fact, because it was protecting sound economics. When Pinochet installed a murderous, brutal dictatorship in Chile, they loved it. They all flocked there, built in freedom and I just had to help out with this marvelous miracle of this bringing sound economics and great profit to a foreign and very small part of the population. So it's not out of the outlandish to think that a savage neoliberal system might be reinstalled by self-proclaimed libertarians with a powerful state violence imposing. That's one, it's one of the nightmare that might come about, but it's not as necessary. There is the possibility that people will organize, become engaged as many are doing and bring about a much better world, which will also confront the enormous problems that we're facing right down the road, the problems of nuclear war, which is closer than it's ever been and the problems of the environmental catastrophe from which there is no recovery. Once we've gotten to that stage, it's over. And that's not foreign distance unless we act decisively. So it's a critical moment of human history, not just because of the current crisis, but that is bring us, should bring us to awareness of the profound flaws, bird flaw is not strong enough, the deep dysfunctional characteristics of the whole socioeconomic system, which has to be out of the perspective, there's going to be a survivable future. So this could be a warning sign and lesson. To deal with it today and prevent it from exploding, but thinking of its roots and how those roots are gonna lead to more crisis, worse ones, extra pay right away. And since we don't have much time, I'll just pose one last question. Yes, so I think many people are interested and also us who are active in social movements and mobilizations and organized for decades using physical and social closeness between people. But now suddenly we are all getting accustomed to what is now being called social distancing. So my question is, how do you see the future of social resistance in times of social distance? And if this takes a few more months, not to mention maybe a year or two, and we are mainly in self-isolation or at home, what would be your advice to progressives around the world, activists, also intellectuals, students, workers, how to organize in this new situation? And could you perhaps tell us whether you see a hope that instead of going into a global authoritarianism, this open historic situation might go in a radical transformation of the world, which would be green, equal, just and full of solidarity? Well, first of all, we should bear in mind that in the past few years, there has been a form of self-isolation, which is very damaging. You go into a McDonald's and take a look at a bunch of teenagers sitting around a table having a hamburger. What you see is two conversations going on, one sort of shallow discussion among them, another, the one that each one is having on his cell phone with some remote individual who he's friend. This is atomized and isolated people to an extraordinary extent. The Satcher principle, there is no society, has been escalated by the misuse of social media that has turned people into very isolated creatures, especially young people. There are actually universities now in the United States where the side will have plaques on them saying, look up, because every kid who's walking around is glued to his cell phone. That's a form of self-induced socialization that's a form of self-induced social isolation which has been very harmful. We're now in a situation of real social isolation. It has to be overcome by recreating social bonds in whatever way can be done, need of whatever kind that can be helping people in need, contacting them, developing organizations, expanding organizations, 85, getting them to be functional and operative, making plans for the future, bringing people together as you can open the internet age to join, to consult, to deliberate, to figure out answers to the problems that they face and work on them, which can be done. It's not face-to-face communication which for human beings is essential, but it's going to be deprived of it for a while. You can put it on hold, find other ways and continue with the, and in fact, extend and deepen the activities carried out. Can be done, it's not going to be easy, but humans are faced with problems on the veil. Can I pose a question since we are both in self-isolation? My dog is trying to have a conversation. But what's that before a parrot? Do we have a bird as well or a parrot or a bird? There was a sound of a bird, yes? Parrot, but a lingual parrot. It can say sovereignty to all the people in Portuguese. Fascinating. Great, thanks so much. Better with wisdom than we hear from Washington. Thanks a lot, Noam. I think this is a beautiful ending of this conversation. I hope we will talk soon. We will all stay at home and we will wait for you and your parrot to tell us when to get out of our apartments and make a revolution.