All Men Are Nazis

All Men Are Nazis

“In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.” Isaac Singer, Nobel Prize Winner

Isaac Singer immigrated to the US from Poland to escape the Holocaust. He has spoken often, both in fictional works and in interviews, of the parallel between the Holocaust and the mass slaughter of animals. If this parallel is valid, it present a disturbing moral dilemma for those in the animal rights movement for in Nazi Germany it would not have been enough to abstain from murdering one’s Jewish neighbors. Condemnation would not have been enough, petitions would not have been enough, nor the passing of humane legislation have been enough. Much more was required of the German people and the world community, and in this all failed miserably.

Within Germany itself, the first step in dispossessing the Jewish people of their rights was to dehumanize them, to create a pseudo class of “sub-humans” thus paving the way for the social acceptance of genocide. They were herded into cattle cars and taken away to concentration camps where the young, old and ill were immediately taken to the gas chambers while others were worked to death for the benefit of Germany.

Such atrocities continue today, though not on the same horrifying scale as in Nazi Germany. What horrifies one the most is that it happened in a “civilized” nation and it was done with a true German eye towards efficiency and organization, so systematic that they were a step away from placing Jewish people on a conveyor belt to death.

The parallel to today’s industrialized meat production is evident. Yes, animals have always been eaten as people have always been killed but never in the history of the world has it been so efficient and organized, the numbers so staggering as to be beyond comprehension. Humans are blinded by denial, immobilized by apathy, or too self-absorbed to recognize any suffering but their own. The ability of humans to justify the murder of other animals, rather of their own species or another always rests on the denial of granting “others” the same rights that they claim for themselves.

In a world where the rights of animals was recognized, the ludicrous claim of the Nazi scientists that the Jewish people were “sub-human” could never have justified their murder even so, which is why the recognition of the rights of animals is so crucial to our own species for our human enemies are always portrayed as less than human to make it easier to kill them.

The moral dilemma therefore is this: how far should one go to prevent the slaughter of animals in a world where it is acceptable to do so? Had we lived in Nazi Germany, what actions would have been justified to stop the murder of six million Jews?

The Animal Liberation Front in independent actions has destroyed property and used intimidation and threats against the perpetrators of animal abuse. Most recently, they claimed responsibility for setting fire to a vivisectionist’s house and in letter to the victim/criminal threatened worse if she did not stop.

Is such action ever justified? Or is it actually too little? Would Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance have prevailed against the SS? What acceptable action could we take if we saw a train of boxcars packed full of humans on their way to slaughter? And why is that different than a train or truck packed with cows or chickens?

To the Wolf Killers

Your hatred of the Gray wolf is the illogic of insanity, and it is fanned by those motivated by greed who feed you lies that you do not question as you spread their poison.

You label us “wolf lovers” as though it’s a dirty word to love a species and want to see it protected. You call us ignorant outsiders but it’s outsiders who come to your beautiful states to destroy your wildlife with guns while you scorn those of us who would come to your states to appreciate your wildlife with cameras.

You damn the wolf for killing to survive because it deprives you of killing for fun. You kill elk by the thousands, taking the biggest and strongest for your trophies and then resent the wolf pack for taking their small share of the weak and the sick. 

In your arrogance, you believe nature needs you to balance it by killing its predators as though the God so many of you profess to believe in didn't know what He was doing.

You label a species “foreign’’ as though any species but human recognize national boundaries.

As you revel in your tradition of killing, posing with smiling faces over your victims, often surrounded by your children, I wonder does it never cross you mind that the bloody wolf beneath your feet also had a family it was trying to feed and protect?

You call yourselves proud Americans. You believe the right to bear arms is guaranteed in the constitution, yet you stand by while the Constitution itself is violated so that you can have your wolf slaughter. You would fight and die to defend our country, and yet you defy the will of the American People that the Gray Wolf have its place in the ecosystem of the Northern Rockies.

We were wrong. We gave you the benefit of the doubt. We believed that you had risen above the ignorance and wolf hysteria of the past. We thought there was actually room in the Northern Rockies for the Gray Wolf to return home without being threatened yet again with slaughter. We were wrong and now the wolf packs will suffer for it because you are still living in the 19^th Century of your great-grandfathers, isolated by arrogance and insulated with ignorance.

You should be ashamed, but we know you won’t be.

The God that knows every sparrow that falls from the sky also knows every wolf that is killed by your hand, and HE WILL REMEMBER.