[Peace-discuss] Chomsky, via Albert, on Nukes

[Brussel Morton K.]

Interesting sidelight to Michael Albert's autobiographical essays. It  
relates to a discussion recently had about Nukes with Jeffrey St.  
Clair, here to promote his useful book on ecological/environmental  
matters as well as to pay his respects to Carl.

On ZCommunications… Albert is interesting and provocative. His  
discussion of racism, in the same essay, I think is profound, and  
will be of interest to members of AWARE

No Nukes and Class

I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
—Groucho Marx

After the sixties, activist movements didn't disappear, of course.  
One movement that attained great size, great militancy, and  
considerable success, was oriented around nuclear power. Despite its  
size and successes, however, the no-nukes uprisings never expanded to  
stretch into average households and workplaces. It wasn't that  
ecological concerns, from nuclear meltdown to dumping waste to  
violating the water supply to fouling the air, weren't relevant to  
average folks. All these ecological horrors were far more damaging to  
poor than to wealthy constituencies. So why has ecological activism  
yet to attain the scale and radical edge needed to really move history?

Eric Sargent, Lydia's youngest son, went with Lydia and me to some no- 
nuke events. He was quite young but somehow knew he did not much like  
these people and their environmental concerns. Why not? What was it  
about the no-nukes movement that put Eric off? Could it have been the  
same things that put off many unions and labor organizations? That  
seemed highly implausible, given Eric's young age, yet I came to  
think it was true. Eric didn't like the mood and manners of this  
movement. The unions didn't like some of its policies because they  
threatened jobs. It was the same distaste.

A related talk I had with Noam Chomsky helps clarify. Chomsky told me  
about having a chat with a bunch of no-nukes advocates and being  
quite put off by their cavalier rejection of nukes, which seemed to  
him to be based only on looking at the possible impact of  
catastrophic meltdowns on consumers and citizens. It was fine to be  
aware of that—and maybe that danger should outweigh all other  
considerations—but what troubled Noam was that the movement didn't  
seem to even notice other considerations. It did not often ask, for  
example, what the human and social costs of using coal instead of  
nuclear power are, not only for the environment but also for workers  
in the mines. It would have been one thing, Noam felt, if the no- 
nukes movement showed concern in all directions. But Noam's  
impression was that large parts of the movement were oblivious to the  
potential impact of their activities on working people. One might  
predict that this would be a movement with an internal culture  
dissing workers, and thus a movement that wouldn't appeal to working  
people, even before they got wind of specific policies, just like and  
for the same reasons that it didn't appeal to Eric, even without his,  
at such a young age, having strong opinions about specific policies. …
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