Noam Chomsky, encyclopaedia of modern political history and prophet of rationalism, declares:
in a rational world [there] would be negotiations between the two sides with independent experts to evaluate the charges that each is making against the other in order to lead to a resolution of these charges and restore the treaty. That’s a rational world but it’s unfortunately not the world we’re living in.
In the same talk he goes on to name the three greatest global threats today: climate change, nuclear destruction, and the threat to democracy. The third threat can be felt, Chomsky says, by the increasing efforts of those in power to silence dissenting speech:
Lula da Silva, the leading the most popular figure in Brazil who was almost certain to win the forthcoming election, was jailed and put in solitary confinement, essentially a death sentence, 25 years in jail banned from reading press or books and crucially barred from making a public statement unlike mass murderers on death row—this in order to silence the person who was likely to win the election. Assange is a similar case: “we’ve got to silence this voice!” You go back in history; some of you may recall when Mussolini’s fascist government put Antonio Gramsci in jail the prosecutor said we have to silence this voice for 20 years.[1]
We can witness this silencing of dissenting voices across scale today. The most common form can be seen in our dominant rhetorical style, which seeks simply to erase the other. A common example: An interview on Vegetarianism. The conservative host leads off with, “you claim to be a vegetarian so how come you are wearing leather shoes?” No discussion is possible here, simply a gratuitous attack on the other! 
Such examples pollute the media daily. Oh, and that interview took place in the early 1980’s. [2]
Dissenting voices are rising only to get crushed by extraordinary institutional power. A threat to democracy for sure but there is something more fundamental, more dangerous than this, something others and I have been writing about for some time.
Let’s return to the late 19thC. in Norway where Expressionist painter Edvard Munch writes:
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.[3]
Munch’s painting, The Scream, is most often interpreted as the scream of a deranged human being or as an allegory of nihilism. But that is not what Munch said. He said he sensed something: an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure in the painting is a human form to be sure but it is nature doing the screaming.
Silencing dissenting political voices is an act of violence with grave consequences for democracy. But we are doing something far worse. We are silencing the scream of nature—the very same scream that Munch and other artists are showing us. This suicidal act of violence against the very foundation of our existence and its voice utterly shuts us off from hearing the suffering that “wants” to penetrate us and teach us—a desperate last-minute attempt to re-direct us from the terminal path we are on. And it is this violent silencing that is manifesting the first two perils Chomsky names: The Global Climate Crisis and Nuclear War.
I have written many essays showing how we silence the scream of nature and how we can open to Her voice once again. Here is a sample:
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywb9kTpkIjw