Climate Denial and Holocaust Denial

And I ask: Are you even listening to me up there? Standing before you is a real, original cockroach, telling you the history of ideas from a first-person perspective. Those of you born, like yourselves, after 2080 have no idea what nonsense existed in my day, and only know what nonsense exists in yours. Secularism replaced the fear of hell with the fear of global warming, and the desire to reach paradise with the green aspiration to preserve the environment

One cockroach in paradise is enough to turn it into hell (Source)

I dreamed I was living in the year 2100, and global warming is considered the biggest flop in history since the Y2K bug. And since an ultra-Orthodox Jew in 2100 is already truly an archaeological exhibit, with a reconstructed shtreimel [traditional fur hat] made of synthetic fox and museum labeling - a pre-post-historical phenomenon - they appoint him as a lecturer in reactionary movement studies, in the department of sectoral studies, in the faculty of nudnik [annoying person] studies. And the students' heads are flying around the classroom, because their bodies stayed at home and only their heads arrived, and I'm writing on the board (that is, on some area in their brains that serves as the lecturer's board):

A movement that wants to go backwards - a reactionary movement. This is an idea invented by Christians, who want to bring back their messiah - not to bring him, to return to the Garden of Eden - not to reach paradise. In short, your great-grandparents' generation was really stupid, and their brains weren't yet built to fly through space, so there were all kinds of anxieties, and all kinds of ultra-Orthodox. I was a black ultra-Orthodox, and there were also green ultra-Orthodox, and pink ultra-Orthodox who loved the acronyms of their Hasidic sects, and white ultra-Orthodox who opposed black ultra-Orthodox like me, and blue ultra-Orthodox who were afraid of porn, all sorts of types, like cockroaches. And they multiplied and scurried about until everyone missed the old, black cockroaches, as a cockroach should be, and you could kill it with a slipper without two years of guilty conscience, because the cockroach doesn't know how to die with dignity but shouts at you from under your foot that it's not okay for you to use your privileged shoe to step on it. Because the conclusion they reached from the Holocaust was that it's forbidden to exterminate cockroaches.

And from so much intellectual engagement with images of buttocks, which are the homework from the department of analytical pornography (he's doing a double major), one of the students' heads accidentally collides with the lamp, and everyone laughs and starts rolling around the room, and I ask: Are you even listening to me up there? Standing before you is a real, original cockroach, telling you the history of ideas from a first-person perspective. Those of you born, like yourselves, after 2080 have no idea what nonsense existed in my day, and only know what nonsense exists in yours.

Who knows what religious sublimation is? (Well, without hands they don't raise them). Secularism replaced the fear of hell with the fear of global warming, and the desire to reach paradise with the green aspiration to preserve the environment and ecological balance, following the myth of the lost Garden of Eden. Before that, in the period after the world wars, the fear of hell was replaced by the fear of the atomic bomb and the nuclear holocaust that would set the world on fire, while the desire to return to the Garden of Eden was embodied in the flower children movement and the stoned hippies with their green leaf. And if you read texts from the era before the world wars, you'll see that war was the embodiment of hell then, and in contrast, the virgin colonial nature was a lost paradise, or before that, innocent childhood in kindergarten, as opposed to sinful, hellish adult sexuality. This is a completely Christian structure, since the Romantic movement that wanted to return to nature and saw the city and industry as a kind of smoking hell. Thus in every generation, they rise up to destroy us and threaten us with a secular hell and promise us a secular paradise. Isn't the original better already?

And then one of the heads busy with God knows what on the ceiling, or just daydreaming in class, suddenly comes down to the black cockroach lecturing on the floor, and tries to raise its nose. And I take pity on it and give it permission to speak, and it asks in the style of a police investigator (which has also become the accepted style of a humanities researcher): What is really the origin?

And I raise my head to it (the plastic shtreimel they force me to wear - so that I don't, God forbid, commit cultural appropriation with a head in a computer - almost falls off), and I answer: When humans were apes that came down from the trees and started walking upright, it was of course tremendous progress. But even then there were apes who wanted to go back and didn't stop warning and screeching about how good everything was when they were university students. Humans continued to long for the jungle and vegetation and fruits that grow by themselves, without effort, and there, neurologically, the myth of the lost Garden of Eden was imprinted in them, that ape-like attraction back to the tree. And then when they had to cross the terrible desert from Africa to the world, there the primordial memory of hell was imprinted in them, and there they also found the first substitute for paradise: the oasis. And then the Nile, which is described even in the Bible as similar to the Garden of Eden. And from there it started to evolve throughout history, up to the communist paradise, and other delights. But the only one in all of history who really managed to recreate the myth was some particularly screeching nudnik, who although tried to recreate the German romantic Garden of Eden, succeeded mainly in recreating hell. The Nazi movement was an ecological movement, and all it wanted was a garden without cockroaches.