You Don't Have to Be a Denier to Be in Denial

We're taking our time watching a difficult and eye-opening movie called Labyrinth of Lies. Based on the life of Fritz Bauer, Frankfurt's attorney general, and three prosecutors who were instrumental in bringing Auschwitz Nazis to trial in 1963, this film is a story that exposes the conspiracy of prominent German institutions and government branches to cover up the crimes of Nazis during World War II. 

I had no idea that many, many Germans in the post-war era didn't acknowledge, accept or even know about the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps during the war. (I knew about Ernst Zündel and his Holocaust denial but didn't realize he'd immigrated to Canada in 1958 from a zeitgeist of denial in Germany.) After the camps were liberated by the Allies (April 1945), "German civilians [were] forced by American troops to bear witness to Nazi atrocities at Buchenwald concentration camp, mere miles from their own homes." (See Forgotten Alfred Hitchcock Holocaust Documentary Gets New Life.)

When Auschwitz and several other camps, like Bergen-Belsen, were liberated, the British army sent along a film unit. Under the aegis of Sidney Bernstein, and with the help of supervising director Alfred Hitchcock, the grisly and shocking footage was meant for a documentary called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. However, as the war came to a close, the governments that had once supported exposing German crimes had a new interest in reconciliation. So plans for the film were scrapped, and most of the footage was archived at Britain’s Imperial War Museum until the 1980s.

That footage is now included in a new documentary, Night Will Fall, which "tells the story of how the footage came to be, and what happened to it."

Margaret Bourke-White, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

In an Independent article (Germany finally pays tribute to first Nazi hunter Fritz Bauer), I learned that "only six of the [22] accused ["Nazi SS henchmen"] were given life sentences. Twelve others were given terms of up to 14 years. The trials nevertheless obliged a reluctant German public to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust and accept that the perpetrators lived in their midst." The article says that "surviving film footage reveals how controversial the trial was. Inside the court the police saluted the accused as former 'comrades.'"

I'll bet you can see where I'm going to go with this. I probably don't even have to say it. The terrifying metaphor revealed itself as we watched Labyrinth of Lies. Many German people weren't deniers -- but they were certainly in denial. Their ignorance. Their apathy. Their disbelief. (Some of the Germans who did see the footage believed it was propaganda staged by the Americans.) Their hubris. The fact that many were still benefiting from their Nazi connections. Their society-wide unwillingness to look at what had happened, to see that "many Third Reich values were still admired," to feel shame and deep remorse, to take some responsibility. (There's a scene in the movie where the stenographer taking down witnesses' testimony runs from the room and breaks down in sobs. No longer in denial, her character is becoming someone who helps in the fight to bring justice.)

I don't know what I would have done if I had -- by luck and timing of birth -- been there. I'm not saying I'm better than any one of those German civilians. But I'm alive today, and I'm not going to let the climate chaos holocaust carry on without vociferously protesting it. And why wouldn't I protest it? There is no SS threatening to track me down and lock me up because I oppose the globalized Western economy's biosphere-devastating, life-murdering business-as-usual fossil fuel status quo. 

I can go about my daily life and speak up about the climate change crisis online or in person, with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers. I can keep my job and send faxes and emails about emergency climate change mitigation to my elected representatives and leaders. I can live free of fear in my country and attend protests, make presentations and give workshops about climate justice. (Confession: I can't do all these things and keep my house tidy. So I've chosen life over tidiness.)

Fritz Bauer received death threats nearly every day once he began his campaign to see justice done (he was responsible for the capture of Adolf Eichmann). What's keeping you from speaking up on behalf of those most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change impacts ... on behalf of all those who are already losing their lives and their livelihoods, their food security and water sources, their homes and entire homelands? 

Our very own "Global Reich" -- fossil fuel companies, the big money that bankrolls them and the governments sitting comfortably in their pockets -- is killing about 5 million people per year, and that number is rising as 2016 continues to knock out temperature records and see record CO2 levels. We see increasing evidence everywhere we look. So where is our outrage? 

We're Standing in the Intersection

That image of the huge juggernaut wending its way down the street in India, through throngs of people, some of whom, it is purported, are getting crushed beneath the chariot's giant wheels ... that image has stuck with me all week. 

And now I realize, we — humanity and all life on Earth — are trapped in an intersection with juggernauts rolling towards us from all four directions. There's (1) the Big Money profit-at-all-costs economy (and the governments riding along in their pockets); there are (2) the mammoth fossil fuel industries (who refuse to budge out of their number one money-making spot); there's (3) the colossus of EuroAmerican consumer culture turning every citizen of the world into a shopper; and then there's (4) the climate armageddon — increasingly catastrophic impacts of global climate disruption — bearing down on us. 

(Read this Scientific American article if you want to feel chilled this morning. "Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok," by Fred Guterl, is an excerpt from his book The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It. In it, Guterl lists dynamical systems theorist Tim Lenton's nine tipping points that could lead to abrupt climate flips — and catastrophic effects. Ironically, Lenton doesn't even mention the scariest one: the methane time bomb in the Arctic. See the Arctic Methane Emergency Group website and this Homo Sapiens, Save Your Earth blog post for information on this potential cataclysm.)

Where do the global warming/climate change denialists, skeptics, ignorers and delayers fit into this metaphor? Ah, they're the ones pushing innocent people under the wheels. Their delay tactics are bringing on a holocaust of unimaginable proportions, and yet they still get their feelings hurt when you call them deniers. Grrrr.

So, here we are. Trapped. Cornered. (Ha! Figuratively literally!) Will some survive by slipping under the enormous chariots? Or by pressing themselves against the walls of the surrounding buildings? Perhaps, but we don't know how many juggernauts are waiting for us behind the four we can see. So, what do we do?

Quite often, the question is "But what can one person do?" I think it's time we stopped posing this question. We have to start seeing the power and strength in our numbers. The solution is simple: stop the juggernauts. How we stop the juggernauts is the complex part.

1. Pull the rug out from under Big Money. Invest only in renewable (perpetual, non-burning) energy technologies and other ethical funds. Stop buying frivolous things. Buy organic and locally grown foods (and less of it = lose weight = more energy to fight this good fight). Vote with your money! 

And wake up when it comes to election time — and in between. Was it Marx who called religion the opiate of the masses? Well, democracy has become our soother, our pacifier. It has dumbed us down and convinced us that we have nothing to worry about. With democracies everywhere becoming police states (to protect fossil fuel production and profits), it's time to be worried, very worried!

2. Fossil fuels. Can't live with 'em (they're killing us!). Can't live without 'em (we're hooked because of our lifestyles). Getting ourselves off this addiction means convincing our governments to invest public funds in the right things, rather than fighter jets and wars on other countries. Our children and grandchildren will be happy to repay debts incurred to ensure them a future. It's those other debts they will find abhorrent. Individuals will not be able to change en masse until governments use everything they've got to make the necessary changes for us: legislation, incentives, disincentives, fines and penalties, education and publicity, tax money, intergovernmental relationships ....

3. The globalized EuroAmerican culture? See through it, folks. Don't buy in, don't feed it. Go for walks instead of watching violent movies. Take a bike trip instead of planning a vacation in Hawaii (unless you live in Hawaii). Our consumer culture drives the fossil-fuelled economy, which necessitates the military-industrial complex. Why don't we all just step out of the rat race for a while till we get the climate mess fixed. Then we can figure out if we want to build a renewable energy-powered rat race — or maybe not go back there.

4. Climate catastrophe? Everyone's talking about adaptation (and hey, I'm guilty: I'm teaching my students to grow food, because you can't learn that sort of thing overnight), but without mitigation (from the Latin verb mitigare, to alleviate: the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something), we simply will not be able to adapt. Global warming, climate change, and ocean acidification will continue for a thousand years — and that's after we reach zero carbon emissions and stabilize carbon in the atmosphere. We must do something drastic NOW. I'm now a convert to the call for geoengineering in the north. If we don't cool and refreeze the Arctic, we are doomed. And for those who insist we shouldn't experiment with the climate system, I say Hellooooo! Wake up! We have been meddling with it (albeit unknowingly at first) since the start of the industrial revolution. There's no time left to be a purist. If we're going down already, why not try the one thing that could possibly stick a spoke in the wheels.

Which brings me back to what we should be doing as a threatened species facing our exterminators. We need to poke giant sticks in the wheels of the juggernauts. We need to place wheel chocks/wedges, giant bricks or blocks in front of the chariots' wheels. Together.

We have to stop these juggernauts at all costs — except our children's lives.

124 Days to Copenhagen - Life Without Agriculture

I've discovered that some people who at least are thinking about the climate change emergency are perhaps thinking the wrong things.

Apparently there's a belief out there that we're going to end up back in a feudal system, whereby today's rich people become tomorrow's rich people, and the rest of us become peasants, serfs or slaves. Our toil (rather than oil) then becomes the engine of that feudal society.

The big problem with that prediction is that the feudal system was based on agriculture, but climate change is going to do away with agriculture. If we don't make the transformation to a renewable energy / zero carbon economy fast, then that climate stability that allowed civilizations to flourish (because of agricultural surpluses) will disappear, leaving us basically back in the stone age, if not gone.

The grim irony is that the deniers like to tell their audiences that we environmentalists would have us all living back in the stone age, when it's their foot dragging over at least two decades now that will lead to a climate holocaust and then a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for any that might remain.

It's the physics, folks, pure physics. We're still pumping more and more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They warm the atmosphere, heating up the surface of the planet, which includes the oceans. If we don't stop very soon and start going in reverse, this will mean disaster for agriculture, disaster for our food security, and disaster for our children's future.