On December 5, over 2,300 people packed into the historic Riverside Church here in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now! Speakers included Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We now face are the most severe that have ever arisen in human history. They are literal threats to survival: nuclear war, environmental catastrophe. These are very urgent concerns," Chomsky said. "They cannot be delayed. They became more urgent on November 8th, for the reasons you know and that I mentioned. They have to be faced directly, and soon, if the human experiment is not to prove to be a disastrous failure."

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AMY GOODMAN: On December 5th, over 2,300 people packed into the historic Riverside Church here in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now! Democracy Now! first went on the air on the eve of the 1996 New Hampshire primary. The date was February 19th, 1996. The show began as a radio show on nine radio stations. Today, over 5,000 episodes later, Democracy Now! news hour airs on over 1,400 public television and radio stations across the globe. Among those who spoke at the celebration of Democracy Now! was Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He's professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of more than 100 books.

NOAM CHOMSKY: For the young people among you, a special word: You'll be facing problems that have never arisen in the 200,000 years of human history — hard, demanding problems. It's a burden that you can't ignore. And we'll all — you, in particular, and all the rest of us — will have to be in there struggling hard to save the human species from a pretty grim fate.

Well, my wife and I happened to be in Europe on November 8th, that fateful day, in fact, in Barcelona, where we watched the results come in. Now, that had special personal resonance for me. The first article I wrote, or at least that I can remember, was in February 1939 at the — it was about the fall of Barcelona to Franco's fascist forces. And the article, which I'm sure it was not very memorable, was about the apparently inexorable spread of fascism over Europe and maybe the whole world. I'm old enough to have been able to listen to Hitler's speeches, the Nuremberg rallies, not understanding the words, but the tone and the reaction of the crowd was enough to leave indelible memories. And watching those results come in did arouse some pretty unpleasant memories, along with what is happening in Europe now, which, in many ways, is pretty frightening, as well.