A new Holocaust is lurking just around the corner, and it will be caused by climate change, Yale historian Timothy Snyder said in a New York Times op-ed over the weekend.
As disruptions in the earth’s climate make food and other essential resources scarcer, men will slaughter one another under the banner of “them or us,” he added, suggesting that this is not unlike when Nazi Germany tried in the 20th century to wipe out the Jews.
Unsurprisingly, Snyder’s op-ed has been met in certain corners with criticism and outright mockery.
“Liberal professors and organizations like Snyder and The New York Times are much more concerned about inciting guilt and panic to further their own agenda than they are about addressing real tragedies currently taking place around the world,” Newsbuster’s Spencer Raley wrote in response to the op-ed.
National Review’s Robert Zubrin summed up Snyder’s article by saying, “So we are looking at the grim prospect of world war and genocide over resources. And it’s all America’s fault.”
The Washington Examiner‘s David Freddoso added, “This is simply insane. Like, lock up the author, he’s insane.”
But for Snyder, it’s a near certain thing that climate change, which he also refers to as “global warming,” will bring about mass genocide not unlike the Nazi slaughter of the Jews.
“[T]he Nazi Final Solution … was in fact the killing of human beings at close range during a war for resources,” Snyder wrote. “The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.”
“The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned,” he added. “But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.”
German domination was based on the “denial of science,” he explained, suggesting also the existence of eerie similarities between the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and efforts today to challenge the science of climate change.
“Climate change threatens to provoke a new ecological panic. So far, poor people in Africa and the Middle East have borne the brunt of the suffering,” he wrote.
The op-ed goes on to suggest that economic crises in countries affected by “global warming,” including China and Russia, could spill over into violent conquests for resources, ultimately coming to the shores of the United States.
“The full consequences of climate change may reach America only decades after warming wreaks havoc in other regions. And by then it will be too late for climate science and energy technology to make any difference,” Snyder claimed. “Indeed, by the time the door is open to the demagogy of ecological panic in the United States, Americans will have spent years spreading climate disaster around the world.”
He concludes by asking whether Americans will at long last accept the science of “global warming” and act to mitigate its damage, or whether they will go the way of the Nazis and react violently as “a wave of ecological panic” spreads across the world.
