'Lessons from our grandparents' is coming out in the next issue of the great 'Coracle' the quarterly magazine of the Iona Community. www.iona.org.uk . It is a letter I wrote to my grandfather speaking of the parallels between our families personal experience of being Nazi Holocaust survivors and the delicate lessons we can learn to the big issues of today.
Lessons from our grandparents
Dan Glass is a young climate activist with Plane Stupid and Climate Camp,who has taken part in non-violent direct action against airports and power stations. In June 2010 he was convicted, along with eight others, of ‘breach of the peace’ for a runway at Aberdeen airport, protesting the growth of aviation and its contribution to climate change. He is Jewish, the grandson of Holocaust survivors. In this article he explains his actions and his motivation to his grandparents, and the significance of his Jewish faith to his commitment.
Because of you – Oma, Granny and Grandpa, as well as the rest of the family – I have been aware of the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust from a very young age. I have been in-built with an awareness of how people struggle, of human depravity, of the nightmarish effects of calculated destruction, of the depths of people, of how much people can withstand; of the great issues in the world. My eyes were immediately opened to issues of injustice. And once my eyes were opened they could not be shut. The unspeakable cruelty of the Holocaust is beyond comparison. However, the Holocaust can teach us valuable lessons about the genocides occurring today. Climate Change is the defining issue of our generation, just as for third generation survivors the Holocaust has tragic resonance. After the Nazi Holocaust, society said that nothing like this would ever happen again. ‘Never again,’ they said…
Actions have consequences
Today we are beginning to witness genocide as never seen before. Eighty-six percent of the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative body on climate change, have recently said that society is likely to soon emit enough greenhouse gases to tip us over the point of runaway climate change: a global increase of 2°C. The consequences of even less than a 2°C increase will be that the Arctic Sea icecaps will disappear, changing the Earth’s energy balance dramatically as reflective ice is replaced during summer months by darker sea surface. This is now expected by 2030, or even earlier. Tropical coral reefs will suffer severe and repeated bleaching episodes due to hotter ocean waters, killing off most coral and delivering a hammer-blow to marine biodiversity. Droughts will spread through the sub-tropics, accompanied by heatwaves and wildfires. Worst-hit will be the Mediterranean, the south-west United States, southern Africa and Australia, resulting in ‘environmental’ refugees in incomprehensible numbers. Already, 300,000 deaths each year are attributable to climate change, according to the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed by Kofi Annan. We are now so far down the line to irreversible climate change that we are no longer in a position to be morally self-righteous: telling people that ‘they shouldn't fly’ or ‘to drive less’ or ‘to shop at certain places’.We have gone from thinking we should do the morally correct activity to acting from plain instinct:‘If we don’t act now, it will be too late for us – we need to fight for our survival.’ If we know the solutions and yet continue to plunder the planet,we are complicit in this devastation.
The world’s top climate scientists state that airports cannot expand and that coal-fired power stations cannot be built if we are ever to meet the CO2 reduction targets necessary to preserve our future. Today carbon-heavy industries can pollute relentlessly with barely a legal challenge, and when ordinary citizens challenge this, they are criminalised. If climate change is indeed the main concern of our courts and government, then this logic must be challenged; and the question must be asked:‘Who are the real criminals?’
Are the criminals the people of this nation who are clearing up this social and ecological mess to prevent devastation for future generations? Or are the criminals those filling their pockets with cash,whilst the poor get poorer and our future is snatched from us? Indeed, the people who are aware of this knowledge and who continue to support the expansion of polluting industries,wholly aware that there are alternatives, are complicit in the crime. As complicit as those who drove the trains to the concentration camps. If we are to stop runaway climate change we need to support the people taking the necessary action, and expose those working to defend a system which protects profit over the planet.
Turning against the tide
This ‘banality of evil’ has shown tome how everyone is complicit. How a terrible situation in society can become ‘normalised’, shows to me that in order to take off our blindfolds to the consequences of our actions,we must stop, take a step back, and go against the madness. Climate change is not an abstract notion or something ‘out there’ but will hurt us all personally, as genocides in history show us. Climate change is an issue of civil liberties. What we are seeing today is a system where police lash out at young people listening to the climate science, the police thus protecting a state which protects polluting industries and not innocent people. Just as in Nazi Germany, where the spirit of Nazism was enshrined in the German constitution, it is lawful for companies today to pollute relentlessly at the expense of the whole world. So just as people illegally challenged that people were being sent to the Nazi death camps,we must challenge these companies. This is both a ‘radical’ approach, as it investigates the roots of the problem of limitless growth on limited resources, and very reasonable at the same time, given the current climate.
So, you may ask (and reasonably I think), if things are so bad why not just withdraw into inaction? Because, as in the Nazi Holocaust, communities facing injustice stick together. It’s instinct. Like stopping a child from walking in front of a car. Or not banging your head against a brick wall. Or stopping unnecessary climate change. If you see something you love being destroyed – whether a lover, a trail in your local park, your mates, your community, the planet – you act to protect your beloved. It’s natural.
Faith and human responsibility
Through my faith I have learnt the importance of understanding humanity’s role within global ecology. Judaism teaches us that human diversity arises from ecological diversity. The reason why there are different human cultures and religions is not only or primarily political, it’s because each society finds unique ways to teach the generations how to live in harmony with a particular place, through rituals and stories. Hence, the lulav (palm branch) and sukkah (temporary structure) on the fall of the full moon. Hence, the teaching that Adam (person) is so-called because the human was created from adamah (earth or soil). Judaism teaches us that the earth is not ours to use for our own benefit. We are here to serve the earth. Our existence is legitimised not through our subservience to the economy, but through our subservience to the planet. The Old Testament teaches us that the land will get to rest for a full year and on Shabbat, no matter what we plan or do. Let her rest and you can rest with her: don't let her rest and you will be thrown into exile,while she still gets to enjoy her Sabbath.
Standing up to adversity
Most striking of all is how you all have taught me, often subconsciously, about the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity. From these lessons I have delved into finding out about the amazing resistance methods used during the Nazi Holocaust,which inspire strategies for action today. I have learnt about underground fighters in the Jewish ghettos planning escape routes for those caged. I have learnt about the chilling consequences for the brave families who hid Jews, like Oma. I have learnt about soldiers who refused to wave a patriotic flag; about the men and women who refused to fight; about those involved in the resistance movement who got up everyday knowing that they would ‘fail’. Almost every day I notice signs that more and more people are longing for our species to cease its self-destructive war with the earth and each other. Strategies of resistance in the Holocaust speak loudly today. Despite the hype around the brave new ‘globalised’ world that is supposed to bring all manner of blessings for our generation and the next, an unsettling stench is seeping out through the cracks and those walls in the information superhighway. Beneath the shiny surface of our super-techno, digitalised, genetically engineered, wonder societies, our planet and our humanity is decaying. I don’t want to ever look into the bright clear eyes of a child and try to explain why the whales are being killed and the forests burnt. Never, ever. I don’t want to have to explain why playing naked in the sun is dangerous and some streams are poisonous. Why some frogs now have five legs, and teenagers blow themselves up in the process of killing other children in the Middle East. I don't want to wonder why some of us work so furiously, while others can’t find work, and why, either way, a deep satisfaction and a sense of belonging is so elusive. I don't want to experience these things.
An inter-generational crime
The younger Jewish generation feel that the issue of climate change is deadly serious. Just as with everyone who will live long enough to see a 2°C increase,we are taking this personally. This makes me very scared: for my generation, for my children’s generation and my children’s children. The people today who are continuing the plunder of the earth’s resources are leaving the younger generations with no option but to clean up their mess. Climate change is an inter-generational crime. Just as in the build-up and duration of the Holocaust, today we are intrinsically part of a vicious moment in history where we don't know whether we will survive. I have transferred this knowledge to the situation today, and knowing that whilst I have the (small) window of opportunity before the storm arrives to act, I will. As staying quiet on genocide is as political as speaking out. How will I feel if we can’t look our children in the eye and say that we did all that we could? I have to do all I can. Not just hold a banner singing songs about giving peace a chance, or even supergluing myself to the Prime Minister as a publicity stunt – but act in all my capacity to take back control for our generation and stop emissions at their source. Climate change is a ‘generational opportunity’.We have a large responsibility on our shoulders. Never before, and never again,will one age-group be burdened with the responsibility of saving the entire human race.
The next generation will either thank us for taking the necessary action, or lament us for not doing enough when we had the chance.
Keeping the faith
I have learnt about having faith in desperate situations. About keeping the faith that change will happen even while it seems that we are living in a lunatic asylum: Scientists tell us we need to stop burning fossil fuels up into the atmosphere and yet the UK as a country continues to fly more than twice more on average than any other country in the world! But authentic hope requires clarity. Clarity which witnesses the troubles in the world – and imagines what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. Faith that makes the impossible, possible. I see ourselves as being so gone these days that we've moved way beyond reason and logic in what we’re trying to do – we need to open new places that allow for new forms of thinking to emerge; to work from a place of beauty and truth. Direct action, such as the work that I do, attempts to do this, and this has always been the point of religion also. The whole structure of religion is set up around trying to create the framework to enable these places of truth to be opened in the practising of them. These spaces then create community and perpetuate a spirit of hope. Both religion and direct action (in the broadest sense) can attempt to speak to the human condition, to the innermost core of people which everyone shares. When we witness these spaces opening, I see opening the critical and fundamental understanding of religion; how faith and hope drive activism and, ultimately, that change is possible. These inherent ethics and morals of Judaism, of struggle and hope, are what grounds me in my action on climate change. It is this faith that supports young Jewish people not to burnout, to keep grounded and to sustain their action on climate change. For it is not purely my faith, or a leadership generation of upcoming Jewish people that will inspire me, but being involved in a movement which draws out a whole range of backgrounds and diversities.
Love and Preservation
The last lesson I have learnt is about love and preservation. I have learnt about the importance of preserving what we love, not just resisting what we hate. How life is about both resisting destruction and salvaging what you treasure whilst you can. Waking up in the morning and knowing that everything you love could be gone in an instant,makes you act ever more to save it.
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