‘Never right to make comparisons’? Holocaust memory, climate crisis, and the debate over appropriate discourse

ABSTRACT

This article considers the relationship between the Holocaust and the increased threat of mass violence due to climate change. Extreme weather events, resource deprivation, and population movements are likely to cause societal stresses which make genocide more probable, but the link between this and memory of the Holocaust has proven contentious. Starting with Archbishop Justin Welby’s apology for invoking the Holocaust during international climate negotiations in 2021, this article considers the history and causes of such controversy, arguing that there are selected ways in which it is reasonable and useful to bring Holocaust memory into dialogue with the climate crisis. .

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• climate change
• memory
• denial
• bystander
• Rwandan genocide

Introduction

Writing in response to a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research in 2021, Omer Bartov declared himself uneasy with environmental histories of the Holocaust. It is an approach that, in his view, is ‘obfuscating rather than clarifying,’ entails an ‘uneasy relationship between the intentional mass murder of human beings and its possible ecological impact,’ and is generally ‘heading in the wrong direction’.¹ But amidst his complaints he does nonetheless identify what is ‘by far the most important link between genocide and the environment’ when stating that

at present, with the approaching environmental disaster that we are witnessing, the anticipated scarcity of resources caused by floods and draughts, superstorms and ocean acidity, a growing cycle of extinction of species, large-scale failure of crops and destruction of cities, we can surely expect ever greater conflict between human populations competing over ever fewer resources, to the point of becoming genocidal.²

In this article, I leave to one side Bartov’s wider critique of environmental histories of the Holocaust to focus particularly on the issue highlighted in this specific passage, namely the possibility of future genocide shaped by environmental breakdown. My focus is on the threat of mass violence caused by climate change, and how contemplation of such impending disaster intersects with memory of the Holocaust.

Bartov is by no means the only historian of the Holocaust to make passing reference to the threat of genocide created by ecological destruction. In The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, a major new historical overview of the Holocaust published during the period of this article’s preparation in early 2023, Dan Stone reflects in his final paragraph that the Holocaust

can challenge us today to consider whether we have done enough to resist apocalyptic visions and movements when they reoccur, as they already have and will continue to do in a world convulsed by global warming, mass migration of climate and war refugees, pandemics and xenophobia.³

In his introduction, Stone similarly muses that ‘with nationalism, xenophobia and racism growing in the shadow of the threat to the planet caused by climate change, the Holocaust seems to take on a different hue than it did to historians writing only a few years ago’.⁴ Building on such comments, this article aims to move the scholarly discussion forward, drawing out and expanding on the different ways in which Holocaust studies and the response to global heating potentially speak to one another.

One key element of this is to critically consider how such a dialogue has also manifested outside of academic writings. In wider public discourse it has repeatedly proven controversial to suggest a link between Holocaust memory and future genocide driven by climate change, with an especially high-profile example of this occurring in the autumn of 2021, when the UK hosted the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference (COP26). Among the community leaders in attendance was the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who in an interview with the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg remarked that politicians at the negotiating table would in future be judged in a manner akin to politicians witnessing events in Nazi Germany:

The politicians who are here today — the heads of government, the heads of state — in two generations’ time they will be remembered for this fortnight and probably this fortnight alone […] people will speak of them in far stronger terms than we speak today of the politicians of the 30s, of the politicians who saw what was happening in Nazi Germany, because this will kill people all around the world for generations […] it will allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale. I’m not sure there are grades of genocide, but there’s width of genocide, and this will be genocide indirectly, by negligence, recklessness, that in the end will come back to us, or our children and grandchildren.⁵

Welby’s historical comparison drew a swift rebuke from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which complained that ‘[t]he language we use to emphasise the risk of climate change should not be at the risk of minimising the rise of Nazism’.⁶ Within hours, Welby had fulsomely recanted: ‘I unequivocally apologise for the words I used when trying to emphasise the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26. It’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis’.⁷

The complaint against Welby may in part stem from a view that he was referencing the Nazi period too superficially, essentially for little more than shock value, or that he was setting up an awkward competition between scales of genocide. But I suggest that what most fundamentally made his words controversial was a deeper discomfort with making any comparison between the Holocaust and climate change-induced genocide. Welby seemed to immediately sense this when concluding that ‘[i]t’s never right to make comparisons’, and, as later sections of this article will show, the extent to which links between Holocaust memory and climate change have been repeatedly condemned in public life suggests that they are a perennial cause of disquiet.

This article is concerned with critically exploring the link between climate change and Holocaust memory, and how such links have been variously asserted and condemned. I am interested in a series of related questions about Holocaust memory in an age of ecological crisis: What underlies the unease at comparisons between the Holocaust and future mass violence wrought by climate change? How is this discomfort impacted by the manner in which the comparisons are expressed, and by whom? Where might the connections between Holocaust studies and response to climate change be more, and less, valuable? And in what ways might this topic usefully challenge societal assumptions about how we remember the Holocaust in relation to other events of mass violence and genocide? Such questions are not wholly new, but this article seeks to break new ground by drawing together and expanding areas of dialogue between Holocaust studies and the climate crisis, and by thinking in a sustained way about the interface between academic and public confrontations with this issue.

In addressing these questions I will often draw on the situation in Britain – Holocaust Studies is a journal based in the UK and this is the context with which I am most familiar – but numerous international examples will also be referenced. Ultimately, I suggest that while Welby’s exact mode of expression and its strategic intelligence might be questionable, his apologetic declaration that ‘[i]t’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis’ has decidedly less credibility than his initial utterance. Rather than merely policing how Holocaust memory is brought into dialogue with other past, present, and future events, we might more productively encourage reflection on how comparisons contextually function and, more broadly, what value remembering the Holocaust has in relation to the central challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. While it is easy to see that voicing comparisons between the Holocaust and climate change can in certain scenarios be superficial, disrespectful, manipulative, or unhelpful to productive discourse, I contend that there ultimately are substantial, credible, and valuable things to say about how memory of the Nazi period can feed into anxieties about mass violence in a warming world. These include consideration of how ideas of bystander behaviour and denial translate between contexts, and how looming mass violence in a time of climate breakdown challenges the way we remember the Holocaust in relation to other past genocides.

It is worth clarifying that the primary focus of this article is the link between Holocaust memory and the potential for mass violence and human suffering created by climate change, rather than the suffering of non-human life amidst environmental destruction. This is also the focus of most public and academic commentators that I respond to here. Welby’s comments, for example, are clearly concerned with the future destruction of human life rather than with ecocide in more general terms. In this sense, my approach differs from a text such as Eric Katz’ Anne Frank’s Tree, where the focus is on links between the Holocaust and domination (and destruction) of the natural world.⁸ Katz’ primary critique is against anthropocentrism itself. While not insensitive to such concerns, this article is not framed along such lines. Thus, when I refer to ‘the link between Holocaust memory and climate change’, my main focus is on how memory of the Nazi period speaks to a period in which we face the threat of genocide caused, at least in major part, by societal instabilities resultant of climate breakdown.

The controversial status of thinking comparatively about Holocaust memory in relation to climate change is not an isolated case. As later parts of this article will note, it intersects with distinct but related debates about remembering the Holocaust in contexts of animal suffering or refugee policy. More broadly, the topic that this article addresses might be considered as just one case study amidst a much wider and interconnected debate about the rights and wrongs of Holocaust comparisons. Some contours of the argument are quite specific to discourse about climate change, but readers may well feel the resonances (and dissonances) with parallel controversies. This article also speaks to a larger concern about what has sometimes been perceived as a growing gulf between academic and public engagement with the Holocaust.⁹ That bringing Holocaust memory into dialogue with future climate change-induced genocide is tolerable in academic writing, yet simultaneously scandalous in public life, is a dynamic that, I suggest, should provoke unease among scholars concerned with how the Holocaust is understood by wider society.

Precedents for Welby’s comments (and their condemnation)

As will become apparent across this article as a whole, academics within several disciplines have, in varied ways, repeatedly brought Holocaust memory into dialogue with the threats posed by climate change. In later parts of this article, I offer new proposals on how we might consider this dialogue in relation to issues of bystander behaviour, denial, and resource deprivation, but it is a conversation that has already begun in scholarly contexts. However, to set this discussion in a wider societal context, it is useful to provide a brief (and selective) survey of public controversies regarding this issue.

We can start by noting that, even during the COP26 negotiations in 2021, Welby was not alone in making a comparison between indifference to the climate crisis and indifference during the Nazi period. One week after he made his comments – and his swift apology – Insulate Britain (a campaign group demanding government intervention to support housing insulation, and thus lower carbon emissions) took to social media to declare that ‘[t]hose who know and are silent now will be known as bystanders, just as those amongst the general population in Germany who were passive and indifferent to the rise of Nazi Germany and the escalating persecution that culminated in the Holocaust’.¹⁰ The group predictably faced the same censure as the Archbishop of Canterbury, with Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), responding that ‘[t]his has to stop. When they use the Holocaust to make their points, do these people ever consider the people who actually went through it?’¹¹

But comparisons along these lines have a lengthy international history. In 1989, then US senator Al Gore published a New York Times article entitled ‘An Ecological Kristallnacht’ that similarly admonished political leaders for their environmental inaction:

In 1939, as clouds of war gathered over Europe, many refused to recognize what was about to happen. No one could imagine a Holocaust, even after shattered glass had filled the streets on Kristallnacht […] In 1989, clouds of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent. Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the dangers will dissipate.¹²

Given his later status as Vice-President, Presidential Nominee, and star of the influential documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s Holocaust analogy has attracted continued attention and been cited, by his critics, as a key example of ‘Holocaust distortion’ and ‘trivialization’.¹³ Condemnation similarly followed NASA scientist James Hansen’s 2007 suggestions that unchecked coal burning would lead to mass atrocity akin to the death camps, with the Anti-Defamation League stating that ‘the use of these kinds of Holocaust analogies is counterproductive, disturbing, and offensive’.¹⁴ Two years later, at United Nations climate negotiations in Denmark, the chair of the G77 group of developing nations, Lumumba Di-Aping, complained that the summit’s outcome was an ‘incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries […] a solution based on values that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces’.¹⁵ In this instance the analogy was not simply between the Holocaust and future suffering resultant of climate change, but also between the ‘values’ of Western negotiators and Nazis, drawing inevitable outrage. Ed Miliband, the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, branded Di-Aping’s comments ‘a disgusting comparison [… which] should offend people across this conference whatever background they come from’.¹⁶ More recently, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, drew widespread criticism for actively questioning the uniqueness of the Holocaust in history and suggesting that future temperature rises will lead to mass death ‘worse than the horror of Nazism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century’.¹⁷ In an article for Genocide Studies and Prevention in 2022, Mark Levene describes some of Hallam’s verbal comments as ‘spectacularly inept’, but ultimately offers a defence of this activist taking ‘the Holocaust mantra of ‘never again’ at face value in order to quite consciously mobilize moral outrage against the indifference, or worse, of criminal irresponsibility of political leaders who do nothing in the face of climate catastrophe’.¹⁸

Levene’s sympathetic academic response runs counter to the recurring pattern, in public and political contexts, of simply condemning links between the Holocaust and climate change as wholly inappropriate. In this sense, the reception of Welby and Insulate Britain’s comments during COP26 should be seen as part of a now well-established routine. But in the period since COP26 in 2021, it is notable that some British public organisations are nonetheless willing to gesture to such comparison, albeit in notably cautious and oblique ways. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) may warn educators to avoid ‘making inappropriate comparisons with the Holocaust’, but nonetheless published an article on its website entitled ‘Climate Change and Mass Violence – The Lethal Connection’, which tentatively entered into similar territory to the examples cited above.¹⁹ Studiously avoiding any direct mention of the Holocaust as a reference point, the article begins with an observation that ‘a changing environment will transform every aspect of how we live our lives but it is in the areas of identity-based violence, systemic racism, extremism, mass atrocity, and armed conflict that we will likely see the most explosive human consequences’. The Holocaust remains unmentioned throughout – the article refers instead to contexts of twenty-first century Sudan and the extermination of buffalo in nineteenth century North America leading to starvation among indigenous peoples – yet its very publication on the HMDT website implicitly invites an erosion of the hard divisions between thinking about climate change, mass atrocity, and Holocaust memory.²⁰ Just a few months earlier, the House of Commons International Development Committee published a report on ‘Preventing Future Mass Atrocities’ that at no single point brings Holocaust memory and climate change into direct dialogue, but nonetheless mentions both across the text as a whole. The authors lament that ‘[d]espite the international community agreeing after the Holocaust that mass atrocities would ‘never again’ occur, mass atrocities remain a feature of today’s world’, while noting soon afterward that climate change may be a key factor in future violence given that ‘a time of growing resource and food scarcity may drive atrocities’.²¹

That neither the HMDT nor the International Development Committee elicited any criticism for these public statements invites questions of who can speak about the link between Holocaust memory and climate change, and how. As voices of the political establishment (the HMDT is largely funded by the UK government) speaking in measured tones, they appear able to allude to the link more tolerably than individuals or campaigning organisations easily accused of citing the Holocaust for insensitive and superficial shock value.²² But we might reasonably ask if it is ultimately desirable for the role of Holocaust memory to be so tentative and curtailed amidst public discussions of looming mass violence driven by climate change. This is particularly so given that, as noted in both the introduction and later parts of this article, those based at academic institutions have felt much freer in articulating comparisons. To explore this point further it is useful to consider the underlying causes of unease that drive the repeated denunciations of comparisons.

The motivations for unease

Of the potential reasons for feeling disquiet at the link between Holocaust memory and climate change, some are fairly specific to the matter at hand.²³ To state the banally obvious, the Holocaust and climate change are phenomena with many distinct characteristics. It may be the case that, as Alex Alvarez has recently written, ‘the challenges and altered circumstances brought about by the changes in earth’s climate systems heighten the risk for the development of communal and ethnic violence, war, and genocide’, but the details of such events will almost certainly be quite different to those that shaped the persecution and mass-murder of Jews in the twentieth century.²⁴ And the connections between climate change and subsequent genocides will often be contestable, with the lines between ecological stress, societal instability, and mass violence being frequently indirect. As Emily Sample notes, ‘[c]limate change does not linearly cause genocide’, and for some people – though not all – the association between a warming world, mass atrocity, and remembrance of a past genocide, may appear too tenuous.²⁵

Another concern with public associations between the climate crisis and memory of the Nazi period is the perception that the Holocaust is being merely used as superficial shorthand for something negative. In a document published in 2021, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) complained that ‘[w]hen opponents of abortion use the term ‘Babycaust,’ global warming activists warn of a ‘Climate Holocaust,’ or animal rights campaigners use the slogan ‘the Holocaust on your plate,’ they are all engaging in the trivialization of the Nazi-led mass murder of European Jewry’.²⁶ But is brevity in expression automatically equivalent to superficiality and thoughtlessness? In later parts of this article I will propose, for example, that there is in fact a perfectly sensible and substantial discussion to be had regarding the related nature of bystander behaviours during the Holocaust and the climate crisis, a point which – if accepted – means that Gore, Welby, and Insulate Britain were touching on a legitimate issue of concern. A further complication with dismissing concise comparisons with the Holocaust is that, at times, it ultimately blurs into a dismissal of all comparisons (whether concise or not). Writing in The Times newspaper in March 2023, Karen Pollock initially complained about people using the Holocaust ‘as shorthand for anything that we hate or fear, anything that evokes pain and horror, triggering a strong emotional response’, but by the end of the article this moved into a broader assertion that ‘however passionately we feel about important and pressing issues of the day […] comparing those current concerns to the almost unimaginable horrors of the Nazi period is wrong’.²⁷ While her more narrowly stated concern about superficial shorthand is understandable, Pollock’s wider point is rather more debatable, not least given HET’s own stated aim to highlight ‘lessons of the Holocaust and its relevance for today’.²⁸

At its broadest, tensions regarding the value of Holocaust memory for discussion of the climate crisis might be seen as simply one more manifestation of the ‘dilemma of uniqueness’ referred to by Jeffrey Alexander in his influential 2002 article ‘On the Societal Construction of Moral Universals’. In a passage worth citing at length, he noted that across a range of Western societies during the late twentieth century the Holocaust

could not function as a metaphor of archetypal tragedy unless it were regarded as radically different from any other evil act in modern times. Yet, it was this very status – as a unique event – that eventually compelled it to become generalized and departicularized. For as a metaphor for radical evil, the Holocaust provided a standard of evaluation for judging the evility of other threatening acts [… T]his bridging process, so central to universalizing critical moral judgment in the post-Holocaust world, has time after time been attacked as depriving the Holocaust of its very significance. Yet these very attacks often revealed, despite themselves, the trauma drama’s new centrality in ordinary thought and action […] The Holocaust is unique and not-unique at the same time. This insoluble dilemma marks the life history of the Holocaust since it became a tragic archetype and a central component of moral judgment in our time.²⁹

This contradictory outcome continues to be clearly visible in many contexts of public Holocaust memory, feeding into any number of specific controversies. The Holocaust has become a universal reference point, yet its tangible application to contemporary concerns is fraught with moral hesitancy.

One particular mode of criticising representations and comparisons deemed inappropriate is to describe them as ‘trivialization’ or ‘distortion’. In the twenty-first century, several commentators have proposed that this amounts to a variant of Holocaust denial, a viewpoint recently articulated in the British context by Michael Whine (Government and International Affairs Director at the Community Security Trust).³⁰ In Whine’s view, ‘[d]enial has not disappeared; it has merely mutated into distortion or trivialization’.³¹ Writing in 2008 on behalf of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Manfred Gerstenfeld similarly associated trivialisation and denial together as related forms of ‘Holocaust distortion’, and explicitly condemned any expression of connection between the Holocaust and climate change.³² IHRA have similarly come to view denial, distortion, and trivialization as associated phenomena, and in a 2021 guidance document on ‘Understanding Holocaust Distortion’ made numerous references to comparisons with the climate crisis.³³

But concepts of trivialization and distortion have inevitably blurry and contestable edges. To start with, one obvious difficulty with this approach is working out the limits of what can be described as ‘trivial’. When, in October 2021, the manager of Bristol Rovers football club likened his team’s performance to the Holocaust, the absurdity of the analogy would be clear to most people.³⁴ But the situation is far less straightforward when drawing on Holocaust memory in relation to the threat of future acts of mass violence wrought by a breakdown of the Earth’s climate system. Part of the problem is that attitudes toward the seriousness of climate change vary considerably, with evidence from British Social Attitudes data highlighting that, in the UK, the extent to which individuals perceive it as a major threat differs with age, educational attainment, and political leanings.³⁵ In other words, a comparison with twentieth century atrocity may seem more ‘trivializing’ to some than others.

The conceptual edges of ‘distortion’ are similarly difficult to bring into exact focus. Note, for example, IHRA’s complaint that

attempts to draw intellectual links with it necessarily diminish the specificity of the Holocaust as the genocide of the Jews and moreover limit the ability of audiences to engage meaningfully with other phenomena, mass atrocities, or crises. Similarly, they take away from the specificity of the phenomenon to which the Holocaust is being compared.³⁶

But is this necessarily true? The answer surely relates to what phenomena are being compared and how the comparison is expressed. For someone to merely state that ‘climate change is like the Holocaust’ is plainly reductive, but as later sections of this article will argue, there are features of the Holocaust that not only speak meaningfully to discussions of climate change, but have been referred to in relation to our warming world by a range of academic commentators.

In this section, my concern has certainly not been to defend every expression of comparison between the Holocaust and climate change. The purpose here is rather to highlight the instabilities present within blanket denunciations of all such comparisons. To further this point, it is useful to consider how this issue intersects with two parallel areas of controversy.

Related debates on animal suffering and the refugee crisis

As will be noted in later parts of this article, there are particularities to the link between Holocaust memory and the climate crisis that are not reducible to a generalised discussion of comparison and its ethics. Despite this, it is useful to nonetheless consider two related debates as illustrative parallels: the first on Holocaust memory, industrial farming, and animal suffering; the second on Holocaust memory and the refugee crisis. Both have been controversially linked to the Holocaust in both public and academic contexts, and in different ways, each intersects with concerns about climate change. Animal suffering is relevant given that climate change involves not only damage to human societies but also the profound destruction of non-human life. As already noted, this article is focused more on the link between climate change and human violence, but the destruction of non-human life is not an irrelevant concern. With regard to the second illustrative parallel, there are also intersections with the refugee crisis because of how changes to global weather patterns are widely expected to generate increases in refugee movements around the world. Such migratory stresses may indeed prove important in creating the conditions for mass violence. In each case, comparisons have been publicly criticised, but such censure has itself proven contestable.

The association between Holocaust memory and animal suffering gained considerable notoriety from the 2003 to 2004 ‘Holocaust on your plate’ campaign by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Several academic commentators sympathetic to animal rights advocacy have been critical of PETA’s approach, concluding that the deliberate provocation of public outrage ultimately overwhelmed meaningful engagement with the topic.³⁷ Others, such as Juliane Wetzel, have cited the campaign as a key example of ‘trivialization and minimization of the Holocaust’, echoing concerns raised at the time by the Anti-Defamation League.³⁸ But whether the comparison is always problematic is questionable, especially considering the more nuanced points that emerge in works on Holocaust memory and animal suffering by commentators such as Boria Sax, David Sztybel, Karen Davis, Jacques Derrida, Élisabeth de Fontenay, and Charles Patterson.³⁹ Patterson’s 2000 book Eternal Treblinka, for example, draws out historic and linguistic links between the justification for killing animals, dehumanising and mistreating slaves and indigenous peoples, and the persecuting and murdering of Jews in the Holocaust. His analysis is not, in other words, simply about making rhetorical equivalences, but about attempting to highlight the ideological connections between the roots of non-human and human suffering. While conscious that this topic is contentious, Patterson has his academic defenders, who note that Eternal Treblinka cannot be dismissed as simply superficial or incendiary. Jason Edward Black, for example, concludes that ‘[d]espite this controversial homology, Patterson does a service to Holocaust studies’.⁴⁰ My point here is not to defend PETA’s notorious campaign, or to consider Patterson’s ideas in depth, but rather to suggest that despite the public disquiet surrounding comparisons between animal suffering and the Holocaust, it can in some instances be an area of meaningful and legitimate debate.

Reference to the Holocaust amidst migrant crises in the twenty-first century has also been a cause of considerable public unease. In Britain, particular flashpoints have concerned memory of the Kindertransport during the mid-2010s and debates on Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s political language surrounding refugee policy in 2023.⁴¹ In the United States, perceived allusions to the Holocaust during the detention of migrants at the Mexico border led, in 2019, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) stating that it ‘unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary’.⁴² The press release drew the ire of a large number of American and international genocide scholars, who in an open letter to the USHMM Director countered that ‘[t]he Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical [… and] makes learning from the past almost impossible’.⁴³ Reflecting on the British situation, and in particular the controversy that surrounds any mention of the Kindertransport in relation to contemporary discussions of refugees, Tony Kushner similarly complains of a situation whereby ‘the Holocaust, constructed without any sense of its complex evolution, has become off-limits to any form of comparison’.⁴⁴ His reference to ‘complex evolution’ alludes in part to the way in which the persecution of Jews under Nazism featured its own refugee crisis in which both Britain and the United States were complicit. In other words, it seems unsustainable to suggest that there is no comparability whatsoever between current societal instincts to keep out refugees and political hesitancy at the 1938 Evian conference.

The pattern of these controversies is similar to those surrounding mention of the Holocaust in relation to climate change. Public expressions in favour of comparability with the Holocaust are frequently condemned, but academics routinely seek to nuance and critique the condemnation, and ultimately the case for blanket non-comparability with the Holocaust proves unstable. But to take this point further with reference to mass violence caused by climate change, it is vital to more substantially consider where the resonances between Holocaust memory and the ecological crisis may lie.

Despite IHRA’s unease with drawing links between Holocaust memory and climate change, the organisation has in the past been more positive about selected comparisons between the Holocaust and contemporary events. In a document published in 2016, IHRA suggested that ‘thematic’ links (rather than straightforward equivalences) may be permissible. With regard to the discussion immediately above, it is striking that it positively asserts that ‘[m]any themes can be explored in the context of the Holocaust to inform our response to refugees today’.⁴⁵ In this and the following section, I consider three themes that connect Holocaust memory and climate change: bystanders, denial, and resource scarcity. In each case, I survey what previous scholars have written on these connections, but also move the discussions further. And it will be suggested that critical consideration of the last of these – i.e. the link between resource scarcity, the Holocaust, and destabilization of the Earth’s environmental systems – ultimately has far-reaching consequences for how we think comparatively about the memory of twentieth-century genocides in a time of climate crisis.

Climate change and bystanders

When Justin Welby, Insulate Britain, and Al Gore each drew Holocaust memory into dialogue with the environmental crisis, the thematic link they specifically made related to issues of bystander behaviour. Their basic argument was that standing by while greenhouse gas emissions lead to ecological and societal disaster is comparable to standing by during the rise to power and atrocities committed by the Nazis. As already noted, their views were considered highly controversial, with Welby offering a rapid apology for his comments. But I suggest that, for all the obvious differences in context, the thematic link between concepts of bystander behaviour is defendable and indeed potentially illuminating.

Concepts of bystander behaviour often associated with the Holocaust have, in recent decades, variously transferred to discussions of numerous other situations. In her treatment of this phenomenon, Victoria Barnett urges that ‘[s]ome caution must be taken with analogies [… as] the complexities and distinctions between different situations may prove insurmountable’.⁴⁶ Ultimately, however, she is more positive, concluding that

[I]f addressing the role of bystanders and related issues of complicity is understood as an important element in shaping political culture and concomitant notions of citizen responsibility […] individual citizens may develop a more proactive stance with respect to the fates of those around them and a greater sense of responsibility for the course of their society as a whole.⁴⁷

With specific reference to climate change and bystanding, a more developed study has been produced by Carol Booth, who argues that while ‘the psychosocial features of the Holocaust and climate change are different, they share the critical involvement of everyday actions that distantly and diffusely promote or facilitate great harm’.⁴⁸ In comparison to Welby, Insulate Britain, and Gore’s targeting of inaction by politicians, Booth is more concerned with the complicity of ordinary citizens within structures that lead to mass violence, but in both contexts of bystanding there are resonances between behaviours in the 1930–1940s and the present. Short-term self-interest, methods of obscuring personal responsibility, and perceptions of powerlessness amidst wider systemic movements toward destruction were, and are, all recurring features of inaction. If the concept of the bystander so associated with Holocaust contexts is able to better stir critical self-reflection in a period during which the evasions of both individuals and governments are crucial to a worsening climate crisis, it seems not inherently unreasonable to make such comparisons whether in public or academic forums.

But beyond such general comparisons, perhaps the most challenging and thus far underexplored value in drawing on concepts of the bystander comes from considering how contentious the very category has been within Holocaust studies. Attitudes toward the notion of the bystander vary, and these very difficulties are themselves useful to consider in relation to climate change. The crucial complication concerns the blurry division between acts we deem as bystanding and those we deem perpetration.⁴⁹ Mary Fulbrook notes that, with regard to the Holocaust, there are many cases ‘where perpetrators claimed they were in reality just bystanders, eyewitnesses without agency’, and that ‘[i]f bystander is effectively used as a catchall concept for anyone who was neither a perpetrator nor a victim in a particular situation, the notion of guilt and the dynamics of violence are effectively reduced to a rather small circle of actors’.⁵⁰ It is with awareness of the shortcoming of such categories that Michael Rothberg has suggested the alternative figure of the ‘implicated subject’. He writes that ‘implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the ‘passive’ bystander [… but] their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators’.⁵¹ In passing remarks on the environmental crisis, Rothberg notes that

We citizens of the Global North are not precisely perpetrators of climate change, yet we certainly contribute disproportionately to the current and future climate-based catastrophes and benefit in the here and now from the geographically and temporally uneven distribution of their catastrophic effects.⁵²

In the context of the climate crisis we might valuably ask who the perpetrators are, who the bystanders are, and how unstable – and potentially evasive – the latter category is. We can point to fossil fuel industries as clearcut perpetrators, but once the interconnected nature of complicity is more fully considered, it becomes obvious that inactive politicians or average consumers are not mere bystanders but implicated enablers. In this sense, the very difficulty of the term ‘bystander’ in Holocaust studies speaks valuably to the complications of its use in other situations where it may be applied.

My point here is not to unravel all of the ethical quandaries involved with translating ideas of bystander behaviour from one context to another, but to underscore that there is a meaningful discourse here. While we might question the precise efficacy of how Welby, Insulate Britain, and Gore invoked the idea of the bystander in public debate on climate change, the fundamental act of doing so should not be dismissed as automatically offensive and superficial.

Climate change and denial

We have already touched on issues of Holocaust denial in relation to the suggestion that comparison, distortion, and denial are all related phenomena. Underlying some of the unease at expressing comparisons between Holocaust memory and the climate crisis is a view that drawing the two into dialogue is to trivialize the mass-murder of European Jews and in so doing articulate a form of ‘soft’ denial. Rather than revisit my criticisms of that position, in this section I turn the argument around to instead consider the link between Holocaust denial and denying the reality of climate change.

Public comparisons between the two have proven predictably controversial. In 2019 the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas was criticised for referencing the Holocaust amidst an LBC Radio discussion about media coverage of debates in climate science:

we need to look at where the vast majority of scientific evidence lies and I do think that the media has a responsibility on that too. You know we don’t generally now have people disputing the Holocaust on the media and having that as a sensible conversation. I really hope that we can just move on now and get on to what needs to be done because the urgency is overwhelming and I think the real debate needs to be about how we get our emissions down.⁵³

Speaking to The Jewish Chronicle afterward, Lucas would ‘apologise for what was not the best comparison’ in a manner similar to Welby’s contrition during COP26 two years later.⁵⁴

In academic contexts, others have been critical of comparing denial in these two situations. For example, in their 2013 introductory textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis Thomas Farmer and John Cook suggest that

[t]he term ‘denier’ is […] controversial, with connotations that climate denial is akin to Holocaust denial. It’s important to stress that the term denier should not be used as a pejorative term equating climate denial to Holocaust denial. Climate change and the Holocaust are not equivalent. However, it is appropriate and instructive to examine the rhetorical tactics and psychological processes at play involved in the denial of climate science.⁵⁵

But there are at least two difficulties with this position. The first, which might equally be used to defend Lucas’ radio comments, is that associating the two forms of denial is not necessarily the same as straightforwardly equating climate change with the Holocaust. It is the processes of denial that are the focus, rather than the events themselves. But the second and perhaps more telling problem is that the ‘rhetorical tactics and psychological processes at play’ that Farmer and Cook then go on to list are so clearly comparable with contexts of Holocaust denial. The use of ‘fake experts’, ‘cherry picking’, various ‘logical fallacies’, ‘unrealistic standards of proof’, and ‘conspiracy theories’ seems like a list of characteristics that could quite easily be drawn upon in an analysis of Holocaust denial.⁵⁶

A more positive line regarding links between these two forms of denial is taken by Peter Jacques, writing in a 2012 issue of Global Environmental Politics. Building on analyses of Holocaust denial by Berel Lang and Deborah Lipstadt, Jacques attempts to draw a more measured comparison with climate change denial, suggesting that both employ similar tactics fuelled by underlying ideologies. Where Holocaust denial is driven by antisemitism and attempts to rehabilitate National Socialism, he argues that climate scepticism is founded upon perceived threats to individual liberty and the economic-industrial base of Western modernity.⁵⁷

But we can go further than this when proposing that it is unnecessary to assert the wholesale non-comparability of Holocaust denial and climate change denial. This because they not only share characteristics, but may actively overlap within some conspiratorial worldviews. As Jovan Byford notes in his work on conspiracy theories, scepticism toward mainstream climate science can frequently intersect with a variety of other conspiratorial visions, and ‘authors of conspiracy material so often find it difficult to escape subtle allusions to the Jewish dimension within an alleged plot’.⁵⁸ In recent guidance delivered to British schoolteachers, HMDT refer to such potential interconnections when warning that

Holocaust denial and distortion intersect with many other forms of denial and conspiracy thinking, such as climate denial, anti-vaccine movements, and claims of fake news. Failing to confront Holocaust denial and distortion from students, even if it is not maliciously intended, is dangerous, as it normalises such thinking and the view that truths and facts are open to interpretation and debate.⁵⁹

Another recent example from the UK is a 2020 report, co-produced by the Community Security Trust and Hope Not Hate, that focused on conspiracy theories prevalent at the meetings of Keep Talking (an organisation which draws together activists from the far-right and far-left of British politics). The report highlighted numerous expressions of Holocaust denial at Keep Talking events alongside other conspiracy theories, reflecting that ‘[p]erhaps, of all the conspiracy theories covered in this report, the one that claims climate change isn’t really happening is the most dangerous of all for the future of humanity’.⁶⁰

That Holocaust denial and climate change denial can, in some instances, share comparable characteristics and even coinhabit the same ecosystems of extremist conspiracy worldviews amply suggests that analysis of each can fruitfully speak to one another. Consciousness of the many obvious dissimilarities between the Holocaust and the climate crisis can, I suggest, be meaningfully maintained within a discourse that compares variant contexts of denial.

Resource scarcity, climate change, and comparative memory of past genocides

A third theme that potentially links Holocaust memory and the climate crisis is the association between resource deprivation and genocide. A key element in the expansionist and exterminationist policies of the Nazis was anxiety about access to natural resources, and particularly food. As Emily Sample writes, ‘[t]wo things were necessary for Germany to obtain the Nazis’ idealized Lebensraum: colonies to supplement the home farmlands, and fewer ‘unworthy’ mouths to feed’.⁶¹ Several commentators have suggested that the destructive changes to global weather patterns wrought by climate change (on top of various other environmental and population pressures) threaten to create new anxieties that could ferment socio-economic stresses, political extremism, and the circumstances in which genocides develop.⁶² This link was notably popularized by Timothy Snyder’s 2015 book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. In his conclusion Snyder reflects that

[t]he planet is changing in ways that might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space, and time more plausible. The expected increase of average global temperatures by four degree Celsius this century would transform human life on much of the globe […] Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts, and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations will jar expectations about the security of basic resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant.⁶³

The Holocaust, in this scenario, presents a cautionary warning of how anxieties about resource availability can lead to mass violence. The genocidal policies of the Nazis can in this way be understood to speak powerfully to the present in terms of the new anxieties we face in a world of destabilised climate.

There is nonetheless an important complication to this link between Holocaust memory and the climate crisis: as Snyder is well aware, Hitler’s anxieties about future food availability in Europe were wrong. Improvements in post-war agriculture meant that concerns about starvation and resource deprivation dissipated, such that ‘[h]ad Hitler not begun a world war that led to his suicide, he would have lived to see the day when Europe’s problem was not food shortages but surpluses’.⁶⁴ Writing on climate change and genocide in the same year as Snyder, Jürgen Zimmerer similarly notes that Nazi policy was based on ‘an imagined shortage of land’.⁶⁵ By contrast, twenty-first-century anxieties about resource competition and social upheaval due to climate change are not paranoia, but rather based on a mainstream understanding of the ecological and social impacts of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.⁶⁶ The implications of this distinction have received little critical attention, but are vitally important to consider. The risk with attempting to draw lessons from an example of misplaced anxiety for a situation of well-founded anxiety is that the case for addressing the latter actually gets undermined. When encountering this particular mode of comparison between the Holocaust and the climate crisis, those already sceptical regarding the need for action to reduce carbon emissions might take a view that the Holocaust warns us of what can happen when concerns about resource deprivation get out of hand. The key lesson, by that interpretation, is that calls for radical action in response to perceived threats of future environmental and social stress should be viewed with suspicion. Such a narrative does admittedly entail disregarding mainstream scientific calls for drastic efforts to tackle climate change, but it is nonetheless appealing for those invested in the economic and industrial status quo. In such a scenario, the Holocaust makes for an imperfect and ultimately counter-productive source of comparisons.

We might simply take the view that comparisons between the Holocaust and the climate crisis are always imperfect anyway, and this is just one more dissonance amidst a wider constellation of similarities and differences that emerge from drawing together two very different phenomena. But taking the concern above a little further usefully raises questions about how we remember the Holocaust in relation to other historic genocides. Because when it comes to the relationship between environmental stress and mass violence, not all genocides are the same.

A useful example to cite is that of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, given that numerous scholars have pointed toward environmental factors as a crucial cause of the violence. Paul Magnarella, for example, concludes that

the ultimate cause of Rwandan genocide was the increasing imbalance in land, food and people that led to malnutrition, hunger, periodic famine and fierce competition for land to farm. Too many people were relying on rapidly diminishing amounts of arable land per capita for their subsistence level existences.⁶⁷

Ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, political upheaval, and the complex legacies of colonialism are among the other crucial factors, but in the Rwandan genocide we see an example of mass violence founded not on the mere fear of resource deprivation, but on tangible ecological stress. In this sense, it is the 1994 outpouring of ethnic violence in Rwanda that makes for a neater comparison with the threat of future mass atrocity driven by global climate breakdown.

While there has been some limited academic commentary on the links between environmental stress, genocide in Rwanda, and climate change, there has been negligible attention given to this connection in public discourse.⁶⁸ While reference to the Holocaust amidst discussion of the climate crisis – and the attendant condemnation of such associations – has been a recurrent public phenomenon in recent decades, there has been little comparable referencing of Rwanda in Western contexts for the simple reason that the Holocaust is viewed as the normative model of genocide. In Britain, this can be seen rather literally in the way that remembrance of the Rwandan genocide is subsumed into Holocaust Memorial Day each 27 January (alongside genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Darfur). In his analysis of climate change and genocide in the twenty-first century, Zimmerer is particularly critical of using Nazism as normative in a manner that produces a focus on ideological rather than broader systemic causes of violence, and in this regard it seems notable that the HMDT’s online description of the Rwandan genocide’s background emphasises racial tensions but makes no mention of environmental factors.⁶⁹ We might ask whether attempting to create public awareness of multiple genocides under the umbrella of Holocaust remembrance has side effects in terms of how those other atrocities – and their causes – are conceptualised and presented. My suggestion is that when resource deprivation is considered as the thematic link between past genocides and future mass violence caused by climate change, we might ask whether the Holocaust is the less ideal comparison. An event such as the Rwandan genocide – or indeed other atrocities with causes partially related to real (rather than imagined) ecological stress – may in this specific regard speak more powerfully to the societal perils we face in a warming world.

In this sense, thinking critically about the relationship between Holocaust memory and the climate crisis takes a different (and perhaps unexpected) turn, moving beyond defence of some forms of comparison from accusations of superficiality to a broader conversation about how we remember the mass murder of European Jews in relation to other genocides in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. When public commentators have turned to historic examples of genocide to speak to the threats humanity faces in a situation of climate breakdown, the Holocaust has been the standard reference point because of its dominance in public consciousness – and preceding sections of this article have proposed that, in relation to concepts of bystander behaviour and denial, such referencing should not be dismissed – but instances of modern mass atrocity are distinct from one another in how their causes are configured. As such, we might usefully question the status of the Holocaust as default provider of genocide-related lessons for an era of climate breakdown.

Conclusion

Unless we maintain that, in a manner akin to Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust is ‘the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended’, comparisons are inevitable.⁷⁰ And in truth, for all his emphasis on the event’s radical uniqueness, even Wiesel could not wholly avoid making analogies between the Holocaust and other historical events.⁷¹ In this article, I have argued that the task should not be to dismiss every comparison but rather aim to critically weigh up its purpose, content, and value. In this regard, it is not the case that each assertion of a link between the Holocaust and the threat of mass violence in a warming world is automatically superficial and offensive. The references that scholars and public commentators have made to comparable notions of bystander behaviour and denial across the two contexts speak meaningfully to the societal threats posed by uncontrolled climate breakdown. The suggestion that the Holocaust was driven partly by environmental anxiety may be also usefully considered, even if doing so eventually leads to wider questions about how we remember the mass murder of European Jews in relation to other genocides and atrocities during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Contact between Holocaust memory and contemplation of the climate crisis is inevitable given that, in public consciousness, one has become the dominant historical example of humanity’s worst potentials and the other is probably the greatest existential threat to the long-term stability of human societies. And the conceptual meeting of the two is only likely to increase. In Britain, young people have over the last decade been exposed to the increased prominence of Holocaust education (notably through its non-negotiable place in teaching modern history at Key Stage 3) while the same generation is, according to British Social Attitudes data, the one most worried about the impacts of climate change.⁷² Rather than simply policing the boundaries of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, we do better to find a discourse in which comparisons are weighed up with more nuance.

This is particularly pressing in public discourse given the apparent disconnect with what appears to be tolerable in academic writing. As noted through this article, numerous scholars have begun to comment upon and explore the link between Holocaust memory and the climate crisis, but allusions to this in public life are habitually deemed inappropriate. This is partly due to the often condensed and fleeting nature of utterances captured by the media, but also because the ‘dilemma of uniqueness’ that Jeffrey Alexander wrote of two decades ago is felt more keenly outside of academia.⁷³ The Holocaust’s place in societal consciousness was secured by a sense that it was so distinct from ‘normal’ history, and yet simultaneously it has become a recurring moral reference point. As noted above, one striking recent example of this tension is the chief executive of HET telling readers of The Times – within the space of only a few lines – that ‘we can and must learn from history’, but that ‘comparing […] current concerns to the almost unimaginable horrors of the Nazi period is wrong’.⁷⁴

None of this is to say that every reference to the Holocaust amidst discussions of climate change is unproblematic. Consider, for example, Welby’s warning that unchecked global warming will ‘allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale’ than the Nazi period. The word ‘infinitely’ is especially unfortunate given how it can be so easily heard as provocative hyperbole. But his apologetic declaration that it is ‘never right to make comparisons’ is itself difficult.⁷⁵ Comparisons have been made many times (and no doubt will continue to be made), and amidst what may in some instances be hyperbole, oversimplification, and superficial provocation, there are valuable suggestions for how the history of twentieth-century genocide speaks to an era of climate crisis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Bartov, “What is the Environmental History of the Holocaust?,” 419.

2 Ibid.,422.

3 Stone, The Holocaust, 302.

4 Ibid., xlivii–xliviii.

5 Cited in BBC, “COP26: Archbishop of Canterbury Apologises.”

6 Cited in Doherty, “Archbishop of Canterbury Apologises.”

7 See note 5 above.

8 Katz, Anne Frank’s Tree.

9 See, for example, Cesarani, The Final Solution, xxv.

10 Cited in Doherty, “Insulate Britain Compare Climate Change Crisis to the Holocaust.”

11 Cited in ibid.

12 Gore, “An Ecological Kristallnacht.”

13 Gerstenfeld, “Holocaust Trivialization.”

14 Randerson, “Comparing Climate Change to the Holocaust.”

15 Cited in Vidal and Watts, “Copenhagen Closes with Weak Deal.”

16 Cited in ibid.

17 Cited in Levene, “The Holocaust Paradigm,” 77.

18 Ibid., 76–7.

19 HMDT, “Tackling Holocaust Denial and Distortion.”

20 HMDT, “Climate Change and Mass Violence – The Lethal Connection.”

21 International Development Committee, “From Srebrenica to a Safer Tomorrow,” 7, 10.

22 HMDT, “Annual Reports.”

23 A cause of unease specific to environmentalism – though one only occasionally articulated – relates to the attitude of leading Nazis to the natural world. In his 2013 essay ‘The Ashen Earth,’ David Patterson argued that crucial continuity lies between Nazi veneration of nature and contemporary ecological thinking. He writes that the need for “response to Nazi environmentalism is greater than ever, as more and more of the world’s environmentalist movements adopt a pagan, idolatrous discourse reminiscent of the Nazis’ (119). Taken to its logical conclusion, concern about climate change in this way cast as complicity with the ideology that lay behind genocide violence against Jews. But the level of continuity between Nazi thought and contemporary environmentalism is very questionable. In his 2012 essay “National Socialism, Holocaust, and Ecology,” Boaz Neumann remarks that ‘the Nazis were not green and ecological in terms of the green and ecological agenda of the last third of the twentieth century’ (103).

24 Alvarez, Unstable Ground, 8.

25 Sample, “The Hunger Plan,” 128.

26 IHRA, “Understanding Holocaust Distortion,” 39.

27 Pollock, “Let’s Calm Down.”

28 HET, “Lessons from Auschwitz Project.”

29 Alexander, “On the Social Construction,” 51–2.

30 Wetzel, “Soft Denial,” 308.

31 Whine, “Countering Holocaust Denial,” 63.

32 See note 13 above.

33 IHRA, “Understanding Holocaust Distortion,” 22, 39–40

34 BBC, “Bristol Rovers Boss.”

35 Fisher, Fitzgerald, and Poortinga, “Climate Change.”

36 IHRA, “Understanding Holocaust Distortion,” 39–40

37 For an overview of responses see Socha, “The “Dreaded Comparisons”,” 229–30.

38 See note 30 above; Teather, ““Holocaust on a Plate”.”

39 Sax, Animals in the Third Reich; Sztybel, “Can the Treatment of Animals’; Davis, The Holocaust; Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 26; De Fontenay, Without Offending Humans, 61; Patterson, Eternal Treblinka.

40 Jason Edward Black, “Eternal Treblinka,” 84. See also Woodward, “Eternal Mirroring.”

41 Kushner, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” 183–9; Tollerton, “Gary Lineker Compared.”

42 Cited in Emil Kerenji, “Why We Resist Holocaust Analogies.” Perhaps significantly, the full text of the USHMM’s 24 June 2019 statement has been removed from the museum website’s otherwise extensive list of press releases.

43 Bartov et al, “An Open Letter.”

44 Kushner, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” 188.

45 IHRA, “History Never Repeats Itself,” 5.

46 Barnett, “The Changing View,” 646–7.

47 Ibid.,647.

48 Booth, “Bystanding and Climate Change,” 409.

49 Barnett, “The Changing View,” 638.

50 Fulbrook, “Bystanders,” 23, 29.

51 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.

52 Ibid., 12.

53 Cited in Halpin, “Lucas Apologises.”

54 Ibid., Local press in Lucas’ current constituency reported in a similar controversy in 2007. See Pegg, “MEP Under Fire.”

55 Farmer and Cook, Climate Change Science, 446. For a similar view, see O’Neill and Boykoff, “Climate Denier,” 107.

56 Farmer and Cook, Climate Change Science, 449–56.

57 Jacques, “A General Theory,” 9–15.

58 Byford, Conspiracy Theories, 7–13, 96.

59 HMDT, “Tackling Holocaust Denial,” 2.

60 Community Security Trust and Hope Not Hate, “Inside Keep Talking,” 4.

61 Sample, “The Hunger Plan,” 121. For a lengthier discussion of this topic, see Collingham, The Taste of War, 18–48, 204–13.

62 Sample, “The Hunger Plan,” 120–9; Collingham, The Taste of War, 501.

63 Snyder, Black Earth, 327.

64 Ibid., 322.

65 Zimmerer, “Climate Change,” 13. Emphasis added.

66 For example, in December 2021 United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stated to the Security Council that ‘The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that climate change could increase the risk of famine and malnutrition by up to 20 per cent by 2050. And the World Bank predicts that, in the same time frame, climate change could lead to the displacement of more than 200 million people. All of this undermines global peace, security and prosperity.’ United Nations, “Climate Change “a Multiplier Effect”.”

67 Magnarella, “The Background and Causes,” 821. See also: Gasana, “Natural Resource Scarcity,” 199–246; McNab and Mohamed, “Human Capital,” 311–32; Snyder, Black Earth, 329.

68 For academic commentary on these links see Richmond and Galgano, “The 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” 155–66.

69 Zimmerer, “Climate Change,” 8–11; HMDT, “Life Before the Genocide.”

70 Wiesel, “Trivializing the Holocaust.”

71 See, for example, Alexander’s discussion of Wiesel’s visit to Kosovar Albanians’ refugee camps in 1999. He remarks that “[d]espite Wiesel’s own assertion that “I don’t believe in drawing analogies,” after visiting the camps analogizing was precisely the rhetoric in which he engaged.” Alexander, “On the Social Construction,” 48. See also Tollerton, “Elie Wiesel,” 125–45.

72 Pearce, “In The Thick of It,” 104–5; Fisher, Fitzgerald, and Poortinga, “Climate Change.”

73 Alexander, “On the Social Construction,” 51.

74 See note 27 above.

75 See note 5 above.