Unintelligible Disasters

I watched a program on the Deutsche Welle channel last weekend in which American and Russian scientists found themselves in total agreement about the threat to our planet from climate change. They even commented on the comfort they derived from their agreement, having once worked against one another during the Cold War. At an historic moment, when there are some quisling scientists interpreting the data of melting Arctic ice differently, and politicians aggressively rejecting the message and rhetorically shooting the messenger, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of the efforts of these scientists to raise awareness of the gravity of the threat of climate change.

The people who refuse to believe that human behavior has pushed us to the brink of possibly catastrophic environmental changes have been dubbed "climate change deniers," deliberately reminiscent of the term "Holocaust deniers" - coined for the people who still refuse to believe that the Nazis exterminated six million Jews. There was a moment during the war, in 1942, when the nations allied against Hitler were completely unaware of what was happening in Poland, the actions being taken by the Germans against the Jewish population. A clandestine meeting took place in Warsaw in October 1942 that had a potentially far-reaching impact for the Jews and for the ultimate outcome of the war. Watching the program about the scientists' attempts to warn governments about climate change reminded me of the strange, almost surreal meeting that took place in Warsaw in 1942.

Jan Karski was a professor at Georgetown University. At one time he was an agent of the Polish Government in exile who was acting as a courier between the Polish underground resistance and the government in London when he was approached by representatives of two Jewish leaders - a Zionist named Bermann and the "Bund" leader Leon Feiner - in Warsaw who requested a meeting with him. His account of the meeting was presented in an interview with Claude Lanzmann in 1978, and is shown in the last part of his great Holocaust documentary, Shoah. Here is a small part of his account:

A meeting was arranged outside of the Ghetto. There were two gentlemen. Now, what transcribed [sic], what happened in our conversation. First - I was not prepared for it. I was relatively isolated in my work in Poland. I did not see many things. They described to me what is happening to the Jews. They described to me, first, that the Jewish problem is unprecedented, cannot be compared with the Polish problem or Russian or any other problem. Hitler will lose this war, but he will exterminate all Jewish population. Do I understand it? The Allies fight for their people they fight for humanity. The Allies cannot forget that the Jews will be exterminated totally in Poland - Polish and European Jews. They were breaking down, they paced the room, they were whispering, they were hissing. It was a nightmare for me. At various stages of the conversation, they lost control of themselves. I just sat in my chair. I just listened. I did not even react. 

They realized, I think they realized from the beginning that I don't know, that I don't understand this problem. Once I said I will take messages from them, wanted to inform me what is happening to the Jews. And I didn't know this. I was never in a ghetto. I never dealt with the Jewish matters. This was their problem, to impress upon me, to impress upon all people - and that was my mission. 

So now, in this nightmarish (two meetings I had with them) nightmarish meetings, well, they presented their demands. The message was: Hitler cannot be allowed to continue extermination. Every day counts. The Allies cannot treat this war only from purely military strategic standpoint. They will win the war, if they take such an attitude. But what good will it do to us? We will not survive this war. The Allied governments cannot take such a stand. We contributed to humanity. We gave scientists for thousands of years. We contributed great religions. We are humans. Do you understand it? What is happening never happened before in history - what is happening to our people now. Perhaps it will change the conscience of the world.

We want an official declaration of the Allied nations that in addition to the military strategy which aims at securing military victory in this war, extermination of the Jews forms a separate chapter and the Allied nations, formally, publicly announce that they will deal with this problem, that it becomes a part of their overall strategy in this war -  not only defeat of Germany but also saving the remaining Jewish population. Once they make such an official declaration, they have an air force, they drop bombs on Germany. Why cannot they drop millions of leaflets informing the German population exactly what their government is doing to the Jews? Perhaps they don't know it. Let them make an official declaration that if the German nation does not offer evidence of trying to change the policy of their government, German nation will have to be held responsible for the crimes their government is committing. If there are not such an evidence, to announce publicly, officially, certain objects in Germany will be bombed, destroyed as a retaliation for what the German government is doing against the Jews. Who knows? Perhaps it will shake the conscience of the world.

One of the Jewish leaders offers to take Karski to the Ghetto so that he can see it with his own eyes and add conviction to his testimony to the Allies. Three hundred thousand occupants of the Ghetto had already been deported to the death camp. But what was left there was enough to leave an indelible and horrifying impression on Karski, some of which he relates in the Shoah interview. 

Upon his return to London, Karski fulfilled his mission and presented his report of the meetings in Warsaw and what he saw in the Ghetto to the highest officials. In 1944, he met with President Franklin Roosevelt and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in Washington, D.C., and gave them his report. Astonishingly, Justice Frankfurter, who was a Jew, didn't believe him. Already, before the Holocaust was revealed to the whole world, there were people who denied that it could possibly be real.

Even now, despite everything we know about Hitler, the physical evidence and the eyewitness testimonies of survivors, the Holocaust remains difficult to comprehend. Even when Raul Hilberg in Lanzmann's Shoah places the Holocaust in an historical context that contradicts the assertion that it was an event without precedent in human history, it is still difficult to fully grasp.(1) This does not mean, however, that we have any reason to disbelieve it.

Claude Lanzmann's interview with Karski was extensive and covered much more than the material he incorporated in Shoah. In 2010, he released a film that is a sort of addendum to Shoah, The Karski Report, that gives Karski's unique testimony center stage. Though Karski fulfilled his mission to report to the Allied leaders and deliver his vitally important message to them, he failed to convince them to take action. Why? At the opening of The Karski Report, he states:

What is knowledge? What can information about a horror, a literally unheard-of one, mean to the human brain, which is unprepared to receive it because it concerns a crime that is without precedent in the history of humanity? Whatever one may say, once Hitler’s war against the Jews had begun, the majority of Jews could not have been saved. That is the tragic side of history, which forbids retrospective illusions that overlook the depth, the weight, of the illegibility of an epoch, the true configuration of the impossible. Raymond Aron, who had fled to London, was asked whether he knew what was happening at that time in the East. He answered: I knew, but I didn’t believe it, and because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.

Although its effects could be catastrophic to every human being on earth, climate change deniers differ from Holocaust deniers in the respect that we have been given warnings about the adverse effects of pollution on the environment for more than fifty years - plenty of time to be prepared for the inevitable bad news that has resulted from our ignoring the warnings for so long. It was never the job of scientists to deliver a message that what we wanted to hear. Verifiable facts are what they present to us, and the facts are inarguable. Something is happening to the climate on a global scale, and carbon emissions - CO2 - is responsible. The source of most of the carbon emissions is not natural, but the direct result of human use of fossil fuels.

But the fossil fuel industry is such an inextricable part of the U.S. economy, and Donald Trump is a businessman who is acting on behalf of American businesses to eliminate regulations on coal mining and on oil exploration and production, that climate change could not have become such a serious problem at a worse time in our history. The only people who disbelieve in climate change are people who are misinformed, misled, or who have corrupt motives for refusing to accept the increasingly irrefutable data. These people - Donald Trump and his cronies - are not concerned with the ultimate impact of their rapacious acquisitiveness, determined to make as much money as they can before it's too late. If someone informed them that they will be judged severely by posterity they would probably express nothing but contempt for it - even if their children will be forced to live with the consequences of their denial of climate change.

It reminds me of the poem "The Parable of the Young Man and the Old"  by Wilfred Owen. Owen, who was killed in World War I (The Great War) just before the Armistice, knew first hand how the youth of a generation paid for the blindness of their elders.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in the thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


(1) 'From the earliest days, from the 4th century, 5th century, 6th century, the missionaries of Christianity had said, in effect, to the Jews, "You may not live among us as Jews." The secular rulers who followed them from the late Middle Ages had then decided "You may not live among us." And the Nazis finally decreed, "You may not live."' From the interview with Raul Hilberg in Lanzmann's Shoah.