Misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s. Faced with a new catastrophe – such as devastating climate change – could we become mass killers again?
An interesting analysis of parallel themes in Hitler’s Holocaust, the invasion of Iraq, and a future of climate change from the Guardian. Some excerpts:
In much of the world, the dominant sense of time is coming to resemble, in some respects, the catastrophism of Hitler’s era. During the second half of the 20th century, the future appeared as a gift that was on the way. The duelling ideologies of capitalism and communism accepted the future as their realm of competition and promised a coming bounty. In the plans of government agencies, the plotlines of novels, and the drawings of children, the future was resplendent in anticipation. This sensibility seems to have disappeared. In high culture the future now clings to us, heavy with complications and crises, dense with dilemmas and disappointments. In vernacular media – films, video games and graphic novels – the future is presented as post-catastrophic. Nature has taken some revenge that makes conventional politics seem irrelevant, reducing society to struggle and rescue. The earth’s surface grows wild, humans go feral and anything is possible.
Hitler the politician was right that a rapturous sense of catastrophic time creates the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural and demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore.
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A misunderstanding about the relationship between state authority and mass killing underlay an American myth of the Holocaust that prevailed in the early 21st century: that the US was a country that intentionally rescued people from the genocides caused by overweening states. Following this reasoning, the destruction of a state could be associated with rescue rather than risk. One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice. In fact, the succession of events precipitated by the illegal invasion of a sovereign state confirmed one of the unlearned lessons of the history of the second world war.
The invasion of Iraq killed at least as many people as did the prior Iraqi regime. It exposed the members of the Iraqi ruling party to religious cleansing and prepared the way for chaos throughout the country. The American invaders eventually sided with the political clan they had initially defeated, so desperate were they to restore order. This permitted a troop withdrawal, which was then followed by Islamist uprisings. The destruction of the Iraqi state in 2003 and the political disturbances brought by the hot summer of 2010 created the space for the terrorists of Islamic State in 2014. A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.
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In an era of climate change, the rightwing version of anarchy, economic libertarianism, may pose the more pertinent danger. As all economists know, markets do not function perfectly at either the macro or the micro level. At the macro level, unregulated capitalism is subject to the extremes of the business cycle. In theory, markets always recover from depression; in practice, the human suffering induced by economic collapse can have profound political consequences, including the end of capitalism itself, before any recovery takes place. At the micro level, firms in theory provide goods that are desired and affordable. In practice, companies seeking profits can generate external costs that they do not themselves remediate. The classical example of such an externality is pollution, which costs its producers nothing but harms other people.
A government can assign a cost to pollution, which internalises the externality and thus reduces the undesired consequence. It would be simple to internalise the costs of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. It requires a dogma to oppose such an operation – which depends upon markets and in the long run will preserve them – as anticapitalist. Supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics. Since the science of climate change is clear, some Americans deny the validity of science itself by presenting its findings as a cover for conniving politicians.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-away