01/04/2021
A weighty call for international education
by Dr. Ian Barron
At the recent 2020 Star Conference: Global Connections Award, Noam Chomsky argued, that Internationalism, Solidarity, and Education are the main themes of our time. The horrors of a boundary breaking pandemic, demands international solidarity, and all the more so, with the distribution of a vaccine in our sights. Yet, as I write this, large corporations and wealthy countries are already appropriating the vaccine for themselves at a terrible cost for the rest of humanity. We can only hope that COVAX, a value driven corporation, working with 2 Turkish immigrants to Germany, will undermine such self-interest.
While, we can begin to envision an end-point to the pandemic, Noam reminds us that we are at the tipping point of no return with the disintegration of our artic icepacks. Leading environmental scientists, tell us that the consequences will be catastrophic and beyond our imaginings, if we don’t act fast and act together.
Two more global threats were named. The first was the longstanding but growing threat to humanity of nuclear war. Apparently, it’s been a miracle that despite, numerous accidents and the reckless behavior of dictators, we are still here today!
The final threat mentioned was that of ‘disintegrating’ democracy. Lest we think this threat is out of place with environmental catastrophe and terminal nuclear war, the recent developments of popularism, Trump in the White House, and a buffoon in Downing street to give only a few examples, has resulted in the doomsday clock being measured by seconds rather than minutes to midnight, 100 seconds to be precise (January 2020) till game over.
To finish on a more upbeat note, Noam concluded “the only hope for dealing with the major crises is an engaged, informed population dedicated to using the opportunities that exist to deal with and end these existential crises. Informed means educated in a way that we can apply our knowledge and skills, but it is the ‘international solidarity’ that is necessary in order to implement these means. It means that society is not only educated but able to deliberate, to interact, globally in fact, to move towards solutions … a problem of democracy, on an international scale.”
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