Dr David Tollerton (University of Exeter)
Dr David Tollerton is Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Contemporary Religion at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Holocaust Memory and Britain’s Religious-Secular Landscape published with Routledge in 2020. During 2019-20 he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship for his work on Holocaust memory in Britain, and in 2021 he is leading an Arts and Humanities Research Council project on early memorialisation of the Covid-19 pandemic.
COP26’s meeting of political leaders, diplomats, and negotiators has been billed as a final opportunity for the world to adjust its course away from catastrophic climate change. For academics, the climate crisis poses practical questions about how we conduct ourselves in terms of working patterns, conferences, and international travel (and how to do so in ways that enhance rather than diminish networking opportunities for early career scholars). But beyond this, and even at the risk of appearing initially artificial, awareness of the current crisis should reach into the substance of disciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences. For Holocaust studies, its relevance requires some careful untangling, but I suggest here that ultimately there may be far reaching implications for how we think critically about Britain’s public remembrance of the Holocaust and other genocides.
On a very broad level, the relevance of the climate crisis for thinking about genocide should be fairly obvious. If we understand future climate chaos as a human-made atrocity, it makes clear sense to consider other forms of such atrocity, with the Holocaust and other genocides prominent examples. The scenarios that COP26 will urgently seek to avoid feature potential for mass migration, widespread economic damage, and fierce competition over resources – all causes of political instability and social resentments in which the conditions for genocide can develop. A warming world is human-created condition in which collective acts of extreme violence are made only more likely.
One key insight from Holocaust studies has been to think critically about the role of bystanders – what was known by whom and when, and why intervention was avoided. As it increasingly strains credibility to deny knowledge of human-made climate change and its implications, an understanding of historical bystander behaviour – be it at the level of governments, institutions, or individuals – is one valuable tool for addressing the contemporary situation.
But bringing the Holocaust into discussion of the climate crisis poses some immediate difficulties. At 2009 UN climate negotiations held in Copenhagen, one negotiator was widely condemned for suggesting that the weak agreement achieved there would lead to mass-death in Africa “based on values that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces.” Such crude comparisons are imprecise and hyperbolic, suggestive of a context in which the Holocaust is rendered merely a marker of historical horror against which future destruction can be provocatively and competitively measured. Against such a discourse, any sort of analytical thinking quickly highlights that the Holocaust and the climate crisis are rather different sorts of things, with different historical backdrops, timescales, and ethical challenges for the present.
Even with a more sensitive eye for detail, bringing discussion of the Holocaust into dialogue with COP26 has the potential to produce some problematic lines of argument. Consider, for example, the conclusion drawn by several scholars (including Jürgen Zimmerer in his own work on genocide and climate change) that the Nazi vision of Lebensraum was driven partly by a Malthusian sense of paranoia regarding overpopulation. Extending outward from this, others could render a comparison between the Holocaust and the 21st century climate crisis actively unhelpful, even a rhetorical tool for climate sceptics who warn against drastic responses to the environmental pressures we now perceive. If unjustified ecological paranoia could drive violence in one context – so the argument might run – it could equally do so again.
Ultimately, we should be wary of assuming that the Holocaust contains only specific lessons that neatly resonate with every societal challenge we currently face. Perhaps at its most basic level, public consciousness of the Holocaust should at its heart be about remembering the individuals and communities lost amidst the mass-murder of European Jews, and the utility of that remembrance for other contemporary concerns is secondary.
Nonetheless, it is obviously crucial for Holocaust studies scholarship to critically consider how this event is remembered and what side-effects come from particular public narrations of its meaning. Against the backdrop of COP26, an especially important point concerns how the Holocaust is remembered in relation to other genocides.
This is because the causes of every genocide are not identical, and there are some more recent events that have been directly argued to have environmental dimensions. Ecological stresses have been cited as one key cause of the Rwandan Genocide and in 2007 the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated that “the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” The exact role of environmental factors in these genocides may be debated, but it seems reasonable to cite these as events which may be appropriately referred to when thinking about the potentials for future climate chaos and mass violence.
A complication, particularly in Britain, is that post-1945 genocides tend to be publically engaged with under the umbrella of Holocaust remembrance. The annual Holocaust Memorial Day, each 27 January, is the prime example here (though we might also point to plans for the new Holocaust memorial and learning centre next to the Houses of Parliament). Whilst its relationship with pre-Holocaust events remains open to valid debate, Holocaust Memorial Day has undoubtedly brought new attention to post-1945 genocides, with survivor testimony from Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur included in many of its events. But, as its name suggests, Holocaust remembrance is primary. If the mass-murder of European Jews is the main framework through which we remember other genocides, does that not inevitably shape how we perceive those post-1945 events and what linkages with current challenges gain meaningful traction? If the Holocaust has become the central model of what genocide represents in public consciousness, how do orientate our narratives if it is other post-1945 genocides that might more immediately highlight the links between environmental degradation and mass violence?
The answers are not straightforward, and form part of vital wider discussions about how we publically remember the Holocaust and other genocides. Despite the complications, every discipline – Holocaust studies among them – should in this era of climate crisis think through its connections with a contemporary challenge that looks set to dominate not only the news cycles of coming weeks but also the very fabric of society-wide behaviour for decades to come.
The British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies 