The sanity we are missing so desperately, like water in the desert.
Transcript here via Robert Reich (excerpt here):
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas – best known, I would say. But it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.” He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.
They say the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.
They say coal is clean.
They say wind turbines cause cancer.
They say sea level rise just creates more beachfront property.
Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more “realistic” and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.
You may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of “climate realism” is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years.
The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco has said “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”
His colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions.”
The American Petroleum Institute says that we need “a more realistic energy approach” – one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.
So, allow me to put this question to all of you: What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?
Their twisted version of “realism” is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting.
The accumulated global warming pollution (because these molecules linger there on average about 100 years and it builds up over time), it’s trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the Earth every single day!
Is it realistic to let that continue?
Reminds me of those ’80s era TV preachers like Jimmy Swaggart or James Robison. The stage even has the right look.
That energetic Al Gore might have been elected in 2000 if he had not then been the scripted Al Gore.
Back when Gore was VP, my husband (of the time) was at a point in his career where he was giving a lot of presentations. He was singularly impressed that Al Gore could speak without any “um” or “uh” or other pauses in his delivery, even in unscripted settings.
agree. in my experience that comes from constant repetition.
“They say coal is clean”
Seems “1984” is being used as an instruction manual.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”
Has been for a while actually.
Thanks for including one of the most articulate explanations of what we might think of as #2 of the 3 central signs or symptoms in the turn toward fascism. Adorno’s radical criticism of civilization, philosophy, and psychology is worthy of far more attention than it’s gotten.
Jung’s “Where love rules, there is no will to power, where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other” points to the first symptom; to go just a little further and allow oneself to recognize the fear-rage-hatred sequence of the psychopath so obvious in the behavior of the far right is to see the inescapable implications of Jung’s wisdom.
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Gore’s higher level of ‘enthusiasm’ is nice but obviously conscious, coached, and scripted, even forced much of the time. He would have needed years of work to seem, let alone be sincere about it. I say that as someone who’s very grateful for his climate efforts, but he’s still essentially a right-of-center apologist for neoliberal capitalism, a position and political-economic system incompatible with the continuance of life on Earth. Those gross inconsistencies inherent in his positions are a huge part of what’s keeping him from being more natural. To get power, he gave up so much love, and so much more.
His lavish praise for Pelosi, just another rich neoliberal denying delayalist who epitomizes every one of the many disgusting features of all the Democratic Party rulers, is a good reminder of that, as if we needed one. (The list of “solutions” to climate catastrophe at the end of An Inconvenient Truth is even better, adopting the corporate oligarchy’s standard of denying the centrality of collective—especially government—action, in solving this and every other problem. They relentlessly return attention to individual behavior as, bizarrely, both the cause and only solution to…anything.) Pelosi may actually be even more contemptuous, devious, and traitorous than the rest, with the way she’s treated Bernie, AOC, the rest of the squad, and the Sunrise people in her office in their viral video. It hurts Gore’s credibility and tarnishes his legacy to do such a Carol Burnett in front of Pelosi in front of an audience.
Amen. Neoliberalism is a planet eating cult. Ecomodernism is their gospel.