A phenomenon that has often preoccupied me as a writer of narrative non-fiction – the work I mostly do when I’m not writing this column – is the way in which the world continually produces metaphors of such domineering obviousness that, were they to appear in a fictional text, a reader of any discernment would view them as disastrously heavy-handed. It’s a phenomenon related in my mind to the way the astonishing sunsets we often see in this part of the world – vast and spectacular displays of luminescent reds, oranges, bruised indigos – would appear simply gaudy and tasteless if faithfully reproduced by even the most skilled of painters. Reality is an ongoing phantasmagoria of the kind of absurd and vanishingly unlikely events that, if we encountered them in a film or novel, would severely imperil the suspension of disbelief, and would seem poorly judged.
An example of the phenomenon presented itself this week in the form of news that, after a summer of extreme heat and low precipitation across the Continent, the Danube’s water levels have sunk so low that dozens of wrecked Nazi warships, along with a variety of other second World War-era artillery and impedimenta, have emerged from its former depths. These ships have lain at the bottom of the Danube on the Serbian-Romanian border since 1944, when the Soviets forced the Nazis to retreat westward. Elsewhere along the Danube, motorbikes and other wartime remnants have been recovered. In an effort to slow the advance of the Red Army, the Germans scuttled much of the Black Sea Fleet, leaving some 200 naval vessels sunk in the riverbed of the Danube, many of them still bearing live ammunition and ordnance.
And so we have this lurid collision of Europe’s history and its future, as climate change unearths – or un-waters – the formerly submerged wreckage of its fascist past. It’s so lurid, in fact, that I almost hesitate to talk about it at all, for fear of seeming complicit in the arguable heavy-handedness of reality’s ultimate author, who is clearly some kind of postmodernist. It’s hard not to see it as what JG Ballard – the British author of such satirical futurist nightmares as Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, and The Drowned World – termed an “extreme metaphor”. This is a latent psycho-political reality laid bare in an exaggerated fictional (or in this case, non-fictional) form.
The climate crisis is the often unacknowledged backdrop to all manner of political dramas playing out on the world stage. It’s a crisis that we can no longer speak about in abstract terms, as something our children and our children’s children will have to live with, one that threatens the future of humanity. Climate change is here and now, and just as it is a decisive factor in the unprecedented heat of this summer, it is shaping the political realities unfolding around us.
Several dead in head-on collision on M9 that left family including child (7) seriously injured
A Wicklow mansion rescued from ruin by seven people: ‘I felt sorry for the house’
Who is Daniel Kinahan? The BBC doesn’t seem too clear
I found the racism of my black Irish childhood embarrassing. Now it has given way to fear
In an essay published in the Guardian last year, drawn from a forthcoming book called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor paint a bracing portrait of the contemporary hard right. The global alliance of Silicon Valley billionaires and anti-immigrant nationalist movements is, they argue, increasingly characterised by a politics of bare survival. Where once climate denialism was the norm on that end of the ideological spectrum, today’s far right is more and more convinced that the future is one of catastrophe and scarcity – climate breakdown, pandemics, resource wars, AI-induced economic upheaval, and social collapse. “Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to skyrocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future,” as Klein and Taylor put it. “The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanised others.”
For cosseted tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the solution is a fantasy of exit: luxury bunkers, private colonies on Mars, fortified special economic zones like Próspera in Honduras. For the nationalist right, the nation itself becomes a kind of bunker, a militarised realm of hardened borders where unwanted populations are expelled or criminalised.
And with this hardening of borders comes, necessarily, a hardening of hearts, a tightening of the circumference of the moral circle. The great upheavals that will more and more be the result of the heating climate will, we know, disproportionately affect the global south. These upheavals will bring with them more and more migration, as people attempt to make better lives for themselves, away from wars and droughts and flooding coastal zones. And for the contemporary right, such people must be viewed solely as a threat – as invading hordes, threatening the way of life of western countries and demanding more and more of a diminishing store of resources.
It is no coincidence that as the climate crisis becomes ever more urgent and undeniable, a language of dehumanisation has come to infect political discourse in the West, and to sicken the public realm. Infamously, Musk – surely the world’s most influential vector of far-right ideology and rhetoric – has openly deemed empathy “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation”, a “bug” he aims to programme out of the culture. (During his brief tenure last year in charge of the US Department of Government Efficiency, when he presided over the total dismantling of the government’s Agency for International Development, implementing aid cuts that The Lancet estimates could lead to some 9.4 million deaths by 2030.) On the evidence of the genocide in Gaza, which many of the most powerful people in the West were willing to either tolerate or enthusiastically support, such a task might not be in any case all that daunting.
And so what is being constructed before our eyes is a world where certain kinds of people will be deemed unworthy of concern or care because they count as a threat to the in-group, or because they simply don’t matter. The evidence of this is all around, in the cruelty and heedlessness that is becoming more and more normal, more and more acceptable. The evidence of where this leads stands revealed like the rusted hull of an overblown metaphor in the parched bed of the Danube.
