"The Coming Age of Slaughter"

"The Coming Age of Slaughter"

In The New Republic (Oct. 28), Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, argues that global warming may cause such devastation that wars and genocide could be a consequence.

That’s what, in part, facilitated the Holocaust: Nazi Germany, not self-sufficient in food, wanted to capture the farmlands of Russia. And “without the Germans’ colonial expansion eastward through the main Jewish homelands, the Holocaust would have been impossible.”

He goes on:

“The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime. But, as the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer likes to say, just because a historical event was unprecedented does not mean that something similar cannot happen in the future. If new ideologies were to unite contempt for others with plans for economic security in conditions of environmental threat, the mass killing of the last century could repeat itself….”

He recommends our investing “in the technical solutions that will make our current interval of environmental panic as brief as possible” ““ like fusion, electric vehicles, biofuels.

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