Renowned thinker and academician Noam Chomsky has said that power-wielding people who are benefiting from U.S. President Donald Trump's malice are working hard to ensure that the world that comes out from the pandemic will be structurally like the one that caused it.
“Even harsher, more authoritarian, more controls, more surveillance. They are working on right now things such as deregulation and many other ways. What's going to be a post-pandemic world depends on what [these] people are doing right now,” he told V.K. Ramachandran, Vice Chairman, Kerala State Planning Board, at the 'Kerala Dialogue' web series on new concepts and government models organised by the Kerala government on Friday.
Stating that counterforces were emerging all over the world, Prof. Chomsky said they could change the ways things would turn out, if they could be brought together to form a powerful voice. “There was the first announcement of a Progressive International, based on the Sanders' movement in the United States; Yanis Varoufakis's DiEM25 in Europe; and transnational organisations in Europe seeking to preserve what makes sense in the European Union and overcome the deeply flawed parts of it. They are forming progressive international voices from all over the world — from India, Africa, the global South, U.S. and Europe,” he said.
Pointing out that “you can never predict how this conflict will emerge,” Prof. Chomsky said that “we are ultimately going to recover from the pandemic at terrible cost, but we will never recover from the melting of polar ice sheets and other grim consequences of global warming, which are going to have a hideous effect on the world.”
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“South Asia will become uninhabitable in several more decades, if it continues on our present course. That is just the beginning and we are not going to recover from that,” he said.
Prof. Chomsky said that Mr. Trump is pulling out all stops to maximise the use of fossil fuels and to eliminate any regulatory apparatus that might mitigate them. “And for a good reason. That increases his rich friends and increases the corporate power. And it leads to the destruction of the organised human life,” he said.
On Kerala's fight against the pandemic, Prof, Chomsky said the State's reaction to the crisis was quite startling, “Its quite amazing to see the reactions around the world. Not just Kerala, take Vietnam. They have not had a single death,” he said.