‘Just like super-typhoons, rising seas and heatwaves, border build-up and militarisation are by-products of climate change,’ Miller writes. We should not overlook the brutal and racist policies of the current Trump administration as a defining factor in the increased securitisation of the border. But the military’s worldview puts migrants under the category of ‘threat multiplier’, and replaces the shared dangers of climate change with the external danger of forced displacement.
On 22 February 1944, Levi was deported to Auschwitz, where he would survive until the Soviet liberation of the Camp on 27 January 1945. A warm and humble man, he resented any suggestion that his experience was somehow paradigmatic, or that he held some greater clarity than other survivors. Yet Levi’s post-war writings remain fundamental reading, especially his 1947 Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man. Through his own story, that work still now conveys with an empathetic yet clinical eye the historical, social and economic prerogatives that define the Holocaust as a modern genocide.