(Translation of "Redet endlich Klartext: Holocaust 2.0", in Bieler Tagblatt vom 17.8.2019, updated 31.7.2021)
Everyone is talking about climate change, a term without direction or threat. This is linguistic nebulisation which is part of our everyday life: the accident, which the insurance does not want to pay, becomes an "event", the genocide of the Armenians becomes a "temporary relocation", money printing becomes "Quantitative Easing". And this nebulization can have deadly consequences: the cause of the Challenger disaster of 1987 was a blown-off O-ring, which had already burned out on previous flights up to a third. One knew that, but by twisting the language up the hierarchy, this defect became a "safety factor of 3" and nothing was done (1). In fact a "safety factor of 3" would mean that nothing happens with a triple overload, but by no means a breakdown by a third under normal load, which signifies a safety factor of zero. Seven astronauts lost their lives.
And what is nebulised by the word
climate change? First, it does not say what's up. “Global warming” would show
the direction, but it’s also too pleasant. “Global heating" may be better
- after all, heat can already affect. But does that nail the facts?
Everyone is talking about climate change, a term without direction or threat. This is linguistic nebulisation which is part of our everyday life: the accident, which the insurance does not want to pay, becomes an "event", the genocide of the Armenians becomes a "temporary relocation", money printing becomes "Quantitative Easing". And this nebulization can have deadly consequences: the cause of the Challenger disaster of 1987 was a blown-off O-ring, which had already burned out on previous flights up to a third. One knew that, but by twisting the language up the hierarchy, this defect became a "safety factor of 3" and nothing was done (1). In fact a "safety factor of 3" would mean that nothing happens with a triple overload, but by no means a breakdown by a third under normal load, which signifies a safety factor of zero. Seven astronauts lost their lives.
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| Fossil by Heartless Machine (10) |
Every second global heating adds to
the earth the energy of three to six Hiroshima bombs (2). It was fantasized
that the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 would limit the temperature rise to
1.5 degrees by 2100. But even if the agreement were met, the temperature would
rise 2,4 degrees. But anyway nobody sticks to it which leads us to 3,2 degrees global warming until 2100 according to official prognoses. That's why in 2017 the 1.5
degrees were moved to the middle of our century and in 2018, the IPCC brought the 1.5 degrees forward to 2040 (3). But even this dramatic report disregards that the greenhouse gases are rising further, bringing the 1.5 degrees forward to 2030, as the respected journal
Nature wrote (4), a forwarding by seven decades within about seven years! And
all this will be aggravated further by 20 or more percent because of disappearing snow and ice which reduces reflection, a fact also insufficiently considered in the IPCC-reports.
With one and a half degrees of
warming 70-90 percent of all coral reefs will perish. The two
degrees will destroy 99 percent of coral reefs. In southern Europe, the cultivation
of citrus fruit, olives and wine will be impossible. Parts of the Middle East and North Africa (5) as well as Southeast Asia will become uninhabitable. Even with
stabilized greenhouse gases any heating achieved would continue for decades.
The fatal release of Methane from permafrost and sea has already begun and
other self-reinforcing mechanisms can be added at any time. Just as threatening
is the galloping species extinction through habitat destruction, poisoning and
heat as well as the increasing water scarcity, everything aggravated by an
expanding population. The German Federal Intelligence Service estimates that
over one billion of people will flee, and that is only the beginning, after
which, together with civilization and human rights, a large part of the
biosphere will go down.
Climatologist Prof. Joachim
Schellnhuber named his book "Self-Combustion" (6)
and David Wallace-Wells his "The uninhabitable Earth" (7). That’s
what it is: By greed, stupidity and herd instinct we are destroying everything,
man and nature through heat, poison and drought. Therefore, the English
Guardian does not talk about "global warming" any more, but takes up
Greta Thunberg's proposals such as "climate collapse", "climate
crisis", "climate emergency", "ecological crisis" etc
(8). The famous biologist E.O. Wilson speaks of the "collapse of the ecosystem" (10). But all these expressions are abstract, out-of-the-way,
they evoke a disaster that you can face like a flood or an avalanche. They do
not imply that everything will end.
For decades, my newspaper the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung publishes every few months very vivid and concise articles
about the Holocaust. The villains are pointed at with fingers, and shudderingly
one reads how human values and victims were exterminated by hunger, weapons,
poison and crematoria, and - oh, say the citizens in their slippers and
armchairs, - how are we so good... But I am somewhat astonished that the same
vividness and precision do not apply to the upcoming elimination of human
values, civilization and humanity from hunger, flight, war, environmental
poisoning and global burning. What in fact lies ahead of us is the Holocaust 2,
this time with gruesome consequences not only for Jews and Gipsies, but for all
of us and for a big part of the biosphere. All just as deliberate as the first
Holocaust, because causes, actors and consequences are known and visible for
all to see. But all bigger by orders of magnitude. This has already started, and
meanwhile we are still fighting over cannabis, COVID, genderism,
health insurance and retirement age, as if this would have any importance in
comparison.
No, it's not climate change, it’s
not global warming, it's Holocaust 2. And yes, we can silence, imprison and
expel whoever protests. But this will not solve the problem any more than
cowardly closing the eyes before reality.
______________________________________________________________________
(*) It was doubted as to whether the
expression "Holocaust 2" (from Greek, literally “Burning of
everything”) was admissible. I have therefore submitted this text to a half-Jew
and a Gypsy, both of whom had lost relatives in Auschwitz and are thus entitled
to judge. Both affirmed that the expression was to the point and could be used.
The term holocaust was used from about 1600, long
before the Nazis. Of those who rejected the expression, various claims were
made: it was claimed that the first Holocaust was an industrial annihilation,
the second was not. Yes, but is the second not industrial par excellence,
namely a consequence of industrialization? It was also claimed that the first
was deliberate and the second was not. Yes, but did not Exxon decades before
the Greens know that the greenhouse effect would lead to catastrophe and still
fund disinformation campaigns with hundreds of millions of dollars? And the
Koch Brothers and all the bribed "experts", and the editors who do
not listen to science or denigrate it (it's curious: If engineers and
physicists calculate bridges, railways, airplanes, power plants, we entrust
them our life without discussion. Only if they speak about the climate, everything
must be lies, isn’t this queer?). It was objected that the first Holocaust had
been deliberately run, and the second was "unconscious", but the
differences seem small to me: Of course after the Second World War, all Germans
said "we all knew nothing about all that," albeit many had benefited from expulsions and expropriations, as Götz Aly has demonstrated.
And hundredthousands of soldiers at least knew of mass exterminations in the
East, if they did not even witness or participate. Likewise with climate: Most
"know nothing about all that", although the information is freely available, and
many young people know it very well. It was also objected that the special
thing about the first Holocaust was racial paranoia - but the second Holocaust, is it not also caused by a paranoia? This time a paranoia of growth and
consumerism, the consequences being even more appalling. It was said that the
first Holocaust was so special because of its unique enormity. Such a view
forgets that this enormity will be dwarfed by this new iteration. It was also
said, that Holocaust means a specific direction against Jews and Gypsies. So
far so good, but the second Holocaust concerns Jews and Gypsies as well,
and this time in in their totality, with the sole difference that this time it
affects everyone else too, including the entire biosphere. Logically the
first Holocaust is therefore a mere subset of Holocaust 2. Sometimes the
argumentation also turned into irrational polemic, e.g. the use of the term
Holocaust was qualified as racist, or the author was mobbed just as the bearer
of bad news.
This is all mere shadowboxing: The question is
whether you allow yourself to name the upcoming horror in an understandable and
graphic way. In this case all the other words seem too clean, too objectifying,
in short insufficient to grasp the impending state failure and the certain
downfall of humanity and civilization. For the most part, in these discussions,
I had the impression that one is resisting the expression in order to hide the
reality under a cloak of squeamish political correctness, and - suddenly everything is no longer urgent, we can move on to
business as usual, by going to school, shopping, and going to work, expand
highways and airports as before. We prefer to leave everything in the
nebulization, right? ... That's exactly what brought upon us this predicament.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-warming-of-oceans-equivalent-to-an-atomic-bomb-per-second
- https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/SR15_FAQ_Low_Res.pdf
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07586-5
- https://www.scinexx.de/news/geowissen/droht-dem-orient-ein-klima-exodus/
- https://service.randomhouse.de/book/Self-Combustion/Hans-Joachim-Schellnhuber/e481489.rhd?pub=1&frm=true
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/books/review-uninhabitable-earth-life-after-warming-david-wallace-wells.html
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment
- https://www.populationconnection.org/article/an-afternoon-with-an-ant-man/
- http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
Some other posts in English:
