Latest news with #SimonSchama
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on rising sea levels: adaptation has never been more urgent
In his classic study of the 17th-century Dutch golden age, The Embarrassment of Riches, the art historian Simon Schama showed how the biblical story of Noah's ark resonated in a culture where catastrophic floods were an ever-present threat. The history of the Netherlands includes multiple instances of storms breaching dikes, leading to disastrous losses of life and land. These traumatic episodes were reflected in the country's art and literature, as well as its engineering. In countries where floods are less of a danger, memories tend to be more localised: a mark on a wall showing how high waters rose when a town's river flooded; a seaside garden such as the one in Felixstowe, Suffolk, to commemorate the night in 1953 when 41 people lost their lives there. If we can learn anything from these examples today, it should be a lesson both about nature's destructive power and humanity's capacity to adapt. But as with the other sorts of damage caused by rising global temperatures, neither the risks nor resources to deal with them are evenly shared out. As sea level rises cause low-lying parts of the world to be inundated, one of the authors of an alarming new paper, Prof Jonathan Bamber, points out that countries such as Bangladesh will be far more severely affected than the Netherlands, with its centuries-long history of holding back the waves. The paper shows that even if carbon emissions are slashed to meet the internationally agreed target of 1.5C, sea level rises will become unmanageable during this century. It argues that a truly safe limit is likely to be 1C or lower, meaning seas would be unlikely to rise more than 1cm per year. Around the world, about 230 million people live within 1 metre above the current sea level. In England, a 1-metre rise would see large parts of the Fens and Humberside below sea level – and thus underwater – unless coastal defences can somehow protect them. These disturbing findings are made more ominous by the fact that even the existing 1.5C goal is moving out of reach. The continued use of fossil fuels and other environmentally destructive practices have set the world on a course towards at least 2.5C of heating. This is almost certainly beyond the tipping points for the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, and is expected to trigger what the researchers call a 'really dire' sea level rise of around 12 metres. Visions of melting ice caps and flooded coastal cities induce fear and helplessness. But people will adapt to sea level rises in the future as they have in the past. This is not to deny or underplay the scale of the threat, but to stress the importance of preparing for changes which are now inevitable, as well as trying as hard as possible to avoid the worst-case scenarios. The less rapid and extreme the changes, the more likely it is that sea defences will be able to reduce destruction in some places, and people will be able to migrate inland, away from unsafe coastal areas, in an orderly way. Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the UN loss and damage fund created to help communities in poorer countries that are stricken by climate disasters. The latest warnings about sea level rises point to the immoral folly of this approach. It is in all our interests to prepare for what is coming, and to ensure that others are prepared too.
Irish Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
If you want to see how democracies cede to autocracies, watch as US universities bend to Trump
Democracies don't turn into autocracies easily or overnight. There has to be a critical mass of true believers – but more important is the critical mass of appeasers. These are the people and institutions who imagine that if they capitulate early they will avoid the worst of it. They cede their own power in the deluded hope that, if they don't fight back, the bullies will leave them alone. And, if they are intellectuals, they smother their humiliation in upbeat, high-flown language. A case in point is one of the world's great universities, Columbia in New York. It is an American institution, but also a global one: nearly 14,000 international students and more than 3,000 faculty members and researchers at Columbia depend on US government-issued visas and green cards. It also runs joint academic programmes with European universities – among them Trinity College Dublin. Which makes it a hugely important test case. If a rich and famous institution doesn't stand up for itself, what chance have millions of ordinary people or vulnerable communities with few resources? I've been looking at the internal messages Columbia's leadership has sent to its staff in recent months to explain – or, more accurately, explain away – its attempts to appease the Trump administration. They exemplify the deterioration of language that is the inevitable side effect of servility. READ MORE Bringing American universities to heel is an important part of Trump's authoritarian agenda. They are centres of independent thought and producers of evidence-based research, neither of which is compatible with the imperial presidency he is creating. In addition, Columbia was in Trump's sights because it has been one of the largest centres of protest against Israel's mass killing in Gaza. This has provided the very thin semblance of justification for taking over the universities – it is being done, allegedly, to protect students from anti-Semitism. As Simon Schama put it in The Financial Times: 'Coming to the aid of campus Jews was always a pretext. Forgive us if we doubt that presenting the subjection of higher education's independence to an ideological purge, labelled 'defence of the Jews', will work as an antidote to anti-Semitism.' On March 7th, the Trump administration announced that it was withholding $400 million of federal grants to Columbia, most of it for medical research, while warning that this was the 'first round of action'. Instead of making clear that it would defend its independence, Columbia responded by saying it 'pledged to work with the federal government to restore the funding'. The administration reacted in typical Trump fashion. It demanded that Columbia concede on the most important principle of any university – academic freedom – before it would even negotiate on the funds. And the university capitulated. It agreed to 'expand intellectual diversity' – code for hiring more Trump-friendly faculty – while 'reinforcing the University's commitment to excellence and fairness in Middle East studies'. It would also hire a new senior vice provost (implicitly one acceptable to Trump) to 'review' the university's 'Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major; and other University programs focused on the Middle East'. This is bad enough. Worse, though, is the way it was presented to the Columbia faculty wrapped in a snakeskin of emollient evasion. The university's president told faculty that 'both within and beyond our campuses, we need to understand the sources of discontent with Columbia and identify what we can do to rebuild credibility and confidence with different stakeholders'. This is what happens when institutions decide to 'work with' incipient dictatorships. They internalise servility, reimagining humiliations as exciting opportunities In this Orwellian language, the inevitably messy life of an institution committed to intellectual freedom becomes 'sources of discontent'. An authoritarian government becomes a 'stakeholder' with whom the supposed upholders of that freedom have to 'rebuild credibility'. And once you start down this road, it's all good news. Instead of saying 'we have, under duress, appointed a new vice provost to comply with the Trump administration's demands to supervise our Middle East-related programmes', Columbia management announced that the person in question had been appointed to 'focus on cross-school academic excellence' – adding, as though it were an afterthought, 'starting with a comprehensive review of Regional Studies programs. This work will begin with a faculty committee review of Middle East programs'. The dean announced that 'we are so excited' that this 'stellar faculty member' will be 'advancing important University priorities on our behalf and in support of the broader Columbia community'. And then on April 16th, in a cheery email beginning with 'Happy Weekend!' the faculty was told that the university had established a special portal in which they could 'share with leadership as they navigate the challenges of the moment'. The kicker is that 'the portal is totally anonymous'. In other words, one of the major universities in what used to be called the free world has had to establish a forum in which its teachers can express themselves anonymously for fear of consequences if they do so publicly. This, of course, reinforces the message already sent by the Trump administration's arrests of students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi who protested against the killing in Gaza: if tenured faculty members have to resort to anonymity, wouldn't it be wise for students – especially those on visas – to just shut up? This is what happens when institutions decide to 'work with' incipient dictatorships. They internalise servility, reimagining humiliations as exciting opportunities. They slide from reassuring themselves that they are merely making a few compromises for the greater good to presenting the abandonment of fundamental principles as excellent news. And, of course, it's all futile. One of the heroes of this moment is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan university. He had described himself as 'a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island – afraid of everything'. But he has had the courage to say: 'If we don't speak up, it's going to get worse. Much worse, much faster ... [Appeasement] doesn't work, because the other side just keeps wanting more and more power.'
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz review – this gripping show isn't afraid to ask awkward questions
It is 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. That means it won't be long before all the people who lived through the Holocaust are gone. It is now left to those who weren't there – such as the historian Simon Schama, born in London two weeks after the liberation – to ensure it is never forgotten or misremembered, and to preserve its lessons for future generations. But how to go about it? In his new show, one of Schama's main methods is to unflinchingly relive the depravity. The Road to Auschwitz holds you in its grip and forces you to absorb the details. We hear of Jewish people being murdered using high-pressure water hoses. We see photographs of the cramped, repellent ghettoes, in which they were starved until they resembled walking skeletons as children froze to death in the streets. We see the piles of shrivelled corpses in Auschwitz. We hear that the slaughter was so prolific that the camp's purpose-built crematoriums became clogged with fat; in Schama's words, 'the furnaces were gagging'. An inmate of Auschwitz – who buried his testimony in the ground before he perished – describes the burning of corpses: the skin blisters and bursts in seconds, the stomach explodes, blue flames come out from the eye sockets, the head burns longest. Told in this way, the Holocaust will never not be shocking to the point of utter incomprehensibility. But The Road to Auschwitz is also concerned with how the murder of Jewish people on an industrial scale was tolerated by Europe as a whole. This is not a journey back to the advent of antisemitism (that was a subject for Schama's 2013 series, The Story of the Jews), although centuries of hatred obviously played a key role. Instead, Schama returns to the early years of the second world war. First, he visits Kaunas in Lithuania, occupied by Germany in 1941. There, a local rabbi was decapitated before Jews were killed in the town centre as their neighbours watched. A local film-maker has spent decades interviewing witnesses, including a man who remembers crying at the spectacle as a child – because he couldn't get a clear view. In footage seemingly from the 1990s, a woman shows off her gold tooth, which was wrenched from the mouth of a Jewish person. She seems to be repressing a smile. Lithuania was a test case for the Nazis – it proved, we hear, that there was a voracious appetite for the murder of Jews. The allies knew what the Nazis were doing in eastern Europe, but believed it could never happen in 'tolerant' Britain. This is one misapprehension that still needs to be corrected, and by examining how the Holocaust took hold in the Netherlands – which had hitherto been the safest place in Europe for Jews – Schama lands on an extremely effective way of doing so. Initially, the Dutch deplored German antisemitism, 'doffing their hats' to those forced to wear yellow stars and putting them at the front of queues. They even staged a widespread strike against their persecution. In the end, it didn't make any difference: the public became fearful of their new overlords and 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered. The moral is simple: no country is immune to the forces of fascism. Yet there are moments in this documentary when the very act of remembering the Holocaust feels hopelessly complicated. Schama's decision to retell it via graphic depictions of the violence and horror does an important job: it ensures the Holocaust continues to rank as one of the very worst events in human history. However, the events in the Netherlands suggest the power of sympathy is negligible. Rather than naked fear or a vicarious sense of personal trauma, 'pity is what others [who] aren't Jews feel' about the Holocaust, says Schama, standing on the site of Auschwitz for the first time in his life. 'Screw the pity.' What should go in its place is a question this programme doesn't answer, unless you count a close synonym. Schama spends much of this documentary bumping up against the limits of language when attempting to articulate his response to the atrocity; 'deeply distressing' is sometimes the best English can do. He gives the final word to the Holocaust survivor Marian Turski, who died in February this year. 'Evil comes step by step,' says Turski. 'And therefore you shouldn't be indifferent. Let's start with reducing hatred.' He reads from a poem: 'The most important thing is compassion. Its absence dehumanises.' Pity, compassion, sympathy: they can't fight fascism alone – but a world without them doesn't bear thinking about. Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer.
