The easy reaction is outrage. How dare Roger Hallam, the founder of Extinction Rebellion, seek to downplay the Holocaust? Do these left-wing campaigners truly think that their self-righteousness gives them a pass on anti-Semitism? At a time when Jewish schools and synagogues across Europe need armed guards, how can he minimize the Shoah?
Such a column would pretty much write itself. But Iâd rather engage with the substance of the eco-activistâs remarks, even to offer a partial defense of them â though not, I suspect, in a way for which he will thank me.
Hallam is a full-time agitator who established his green protest movement while studying for a Ph.D. in âcivil disobedience.â He was being interviewed by a German newspaper when he likened the effects of climate change to the mass murders in Auschwitz. The German journalist, slightly shocked, suggested that the enormity of the Holocaust was unique, but Hallam persisted:
âThe fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history,â he said, listing a number of other slaughters and atrocities, such as the people worked to death on rubber plantations in the Belgian Congo. The Holocaust was âalmost a normal eventâ when viewed against this background, he argued, âjust another fuckery in human historyâ.
We can all agree, I hope, that these remarks are spectacularly offensive. Hallam himself seems to accept that his choice of language was infelicitous. But it is worth putting our finger on why the bureaucratic murder of millions of European Jews stands out from other killings.
After all, Hallam is right to say that millions have been murdered on ethnic or religious grounds down the centuries. Stalin, for example, deported whole peoples to work them to death in his labor camps. Almost all jurists apply the word âgenocideâ to the slaughters in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. Most also use it to refer to Ukraineâs Holodomor, which killed some three and a half million people, and the massacre of between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.
There are many more examples: the Atlantic slave trade, the communal violence that accompanied the partition of India, the forcible relocation of Native American tribes, or, come to that, the removal of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945.
What all these abominations have in common is that they were indiscriminate. If you belonged to a condemned group, no individual virtue could save you. There was no pretense of due process or decency. Men, women, and children were damned by category. Murder and mistreatment were collectivized.
Go further back, and what we now call genocides were even more common. Sometimes, the classification was sectarian, as in Europeâs religious wars. More often it tribal â think of, say, the Mongol invasions. Indeed, the further we go, as Steven Pinker showed in his 2011 masterpiece, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the worse things get. Read the chronicles of the earliest kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Notice how often we read of them ârazingâ this or that city. Now look away from this article for 20 seconds and think about what is implied by that word.
What makes the Jewish Holocaust stand out, frankly, is its proximity. The victims were not removed from us by life experience. They were not hungry villagers fleeing from Mongol horse-archers. They had cars and telephones, worked as lawyers and accountants, wore suits to the office. And what was true of the victims was true also of the perpetrators.
The Holocaust was a hideous reversion to tribal murder, this time using paperwork and train timetables. It shocks us precisely because we thought we had moved on as a species. Slavery and slaughter had been the lot of our ancestors for longer than we know, and Jews had had more than their fair share, going back to the Books of Exodus and Esther. But there is a difference between a genocide planned by a courtier in the palace of a Persian king in the fifth century B.C., and a genocide planned by educated men who listened to Beethoven and took an interest in nuclear physics.
Why the extra shock? Because, as we become wealthier, more leisured and more literate, our empathy broadens. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer calls it âthe expanding circle.â
And that, Iâm afraid, is what Hallam and his movement are inadvertently putting at risk. The world these eco-protesters want â a poorer, sparser world â would not be filled with harmonious hippy communes. It would be a world in which the circle shrank back, in which people found it harder to empathize with those removed from their experience. A world, in short, where murdering or enslaving other tribes ceased to be unthinkable.
