[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I have to admit that the thought of Noam Chomsky’s voice no longer being part of our world depresses me. He’s made such sense out of our distinctly embattled planet in a way no one else I can think of has. Today, I’m posting a 2013 piece he did for TomDispatch on how humanity had put itself at what he called “the eve of destruction” and, more than a decade ago, he already had climate change in mind as well as — you won’t be surprised to learn — nuclear weapons.
I only recently read what is likely to be his last book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, which he co-wrote with the young Nathan J. Robinson. As ever, Chomsky’s work remains eye-opening. Even his historical memory in this latest book remains remarkable. More than remarkable, actually. Who today remembers (or even knew) that, in the Vietnam War era, the U.S. at one point informally offered France two atomic bombs to help defeat the Vietnamese (an offer that, fortunately, was never taken up); or that, in those years, the U.S. dropped 2,093,100 tons (and no, that is not a misprint) of ordnance on Laos, a ton for every person living in that landlocked country the size of Pennsylvania, making it the most bombed nation in history?
As he writes toward the end of the book, “It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and restrain the violence of the state. It is cheap and easy to deplore the crimes of others, while dismissing or justifying our own. An honest person will choose a different course.” How true and how particularly apt, given the next Trump era to come! As far as I’m concerned, Chomsky has always been a must-read. Get your hands on a copy of his new book if you can.
And while I’m at it, let me also recommend a different book. I only recently began rereading a volume that, in another life in the 1990s, I actually edited: John Dower’s remarkable history of the end of World War II in the Pacific, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. All these years later, it remains a one-of-a-kind, utterly absorbing tale. I can think of nothing else like it. I couldn’t recommend it more highly either!
And now, check out my intro and Chomsky’s piece from more than a decade ago — and if the mood strikes you, as 2024 is coming to an end, visit the TomDispatch donation page and see what you can do to keep TD’s world spinning just a little longer. Tom]
It didn’t take long. In the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the “victory weapon,” the atomic bomb, on two Japanese cities in August 1945, American fears and fantasies ran wild. Almost immediately, Americans began to reconceive themselves as potential victims of the bomb. In the scenarios of destruction that would populate newspapers, magazines, radio shows, and private imaginations, our cities were ringed with concentric circles of destruction and up to 10 million people in the U.S. and tens of millions elsewhere died horribly in a few days of imagined battle. Even victory, when it came in those first post-war years of futuristic dreams of destruction, had the look of defeat. And the two wartime American stories — of triumphalism beyond imagining and ashes — turned out to be incapable of cohabiting in the same forms. So the bomb fled the war movie (where it essentially never made an appearance) for the sci-fi flick in which stand-ins of every sort — alien superweapons and radioactive reptilian and other mutant monsters — destroyed the planet, endangered humanity, and pursued the young into every drive-in movie theater in the country.
As late as 1995, those two stories, the triumphalist end of “the Good War” and the disastrous beginning of the atomic age, still couldn’t inhabit the same space. In that 50th anniversary year, a planned exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum that was supposed to pair the gleaming fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that carried the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, with the caramelized remains of a schoolchild’s lunchbox (“No trace of Reiko Watanabe was ever found”) would be canceled. The outrage from veterans’ groups and the Republican right was just too much, the discomfort still too strong.
Until 1945, of course, the apocalypse had been the property of the Bible, and “end times” the province of God (and perhaps a budding branch of pulp lit called science fiction), but not of humanity. Since then, it’s been ours, and as it turned out, we were acting apocalyptically in ways that weren’t apparent in 1945, that weren’t attached to a single wonder weapon, and that remain difficult to grasp and even deal with now. With that in mind, and with thanks to Javier Navarro, we have adapted a video interview done with TomDispatch regular Noam Chomsky by What, the association Navarro helped to found. Reworked by Chomsky himself, it offers his thoughts on a perilous future that is distinctly in our hands. Tom
The Path to Disaster
What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re a historian 100 years from now -- assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious -- and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.
For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.
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