Sacrifice and Doubt

Chomsky: Humanity's survival 'by no means a sure thing'

02/27/2009 @ 3:24 pm -RawStory

Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

-excerpt

Chomsky's full comments are carried in the video below.

"What I mean by that is pretty straightforward," said Chomsky. "Survival is a word we all understand. I'd like to know whether there's going to be a world -- a decent world -- where, say, my grandchildren can live. That's the question of survival.

"The survival of the human species is by no means an obvious thing. There are very severe threats to survival. We learn about them all the time. The threat of environmental destruction is much too real to put to the side. The threat of destruction by weapons of mass destruction -- that has come very close many times. We just learned at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, a terminal nuclear war was averted by one submarine commander who countermanded the order to send off nuclear missiles.

"... So, survival of the species is by no means a sure thing. Decent survival. Well, what's hegemony? Hegemony has to do with the domination of the International system by small sectors of power. At the moment there happens to be one superpower, but it does not dominate the rest of the world in all dimensions, but overwhelmingly dominates it in one dimension: Namely, the military dimension."

"Unfortunately, if you look at the factors that surround hegemony, the short term goals to maximize profit, to increase control of the world and so on, and ask how those goals will play out, turns out they do threaten survival," said Chomsky.

Read his book,

'Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.'