by DAVID BARSAMIAN
An interview with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky needs no introduction. One of the most famous public intellectuals in the world, his bibliography is enormous and his contributions to the fight for a better world endless. In a recent conversation, Chomsky talks about the state of the Republican Party, the ongoing debacle of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the absurdities of American exceptionalism, and the hope he has in organizing to win desperately needed measures like a Green New Deal.
Chomsky spoke with David Barsamian for Alternative Radio. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
DB:
In the United States, COVID-19 has resulted in more than seven hundred thousand dead. Globally, the death toll is in the millions. Vaccines have been effective, yet there’s a significant resistance to getting vaccinated, particularly in the United States. Why? What makes some people susceptible to conspiracy theories about getting vaccinated?
NC:
We should look at exactly what’s happening. If you look at global maps, like the kind that the New York Times posts every day, the United States stands out. It’s the main global hot spot outside of Mongolia and a couple of others. If you look closely, it’s not the United States. It’s selected parts of the United States. Overwhelmingly, it’s the old Confederacy and a couple of outliers like Idaho and Wyoming, which are rock-ribbed Republican states. There’s even been analysis by counties by now, and it turns out that there’s a quite sharp difference between counties that voted for Joe Biden and counties that voted for Donald Trump. So, to a very substantial extent, it’s a partisan issue.
Parts of the Left have bought into this, too. They’re not statistically significant as compared with the mass refusal on the part of Republicans. And, in fact, the last poll I saw showed that over 50 percent of Republicans said they were not going to get vaccinated. So it’s not just that the country is refusing — very substantially, it’s a Republican issue.
It’s very serious. The hospitals in Republican areas like Idaho and Alabama are being crushed by COVID cases. Some states have had to stop providing regular services in hospitals because they have no beds. (Actually, in a minor way, that happened to me, too: I couldn’t get to a hospital that I needed to because they had no beds. It wasn’t terrible. I survived.)
Apart from the social cost, which is huge, they’re endangering people. The unvaccinated are endangering others. They’re severely endangering children who can’t get vaccinated yet. They have no protection. They’re even endangering the vaccinated. I mean, the vaccine is very effective, but not 100 percent. So they’re endangering the vaccinated, too. And on top of that, they’re creating a pool in which the virus can mutate freely, maybe leading to variants that might not even be treatable. It could be a raging, untreatable pandemic.
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