United Poultry Concerns - [link removed]
6 January 2020

Overlapping Oppressions:
Register Now for Our Conscious Eating Conference Feb. 29, 2020!

Conscious Eating Conference:
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My talk, "Comparing Atrocities: Pros, Cons and Paradoxes," will argue that
parallels can be drawn between incommensurable atrocities affecting both human
and nonhuman animals, but that we need to be selective in our use of parallels.
I further argue that while every experience is incommensurable, each unique
experience paradoxically expresses the larger fabric of life to which no single
individual or group can lay claim as the sole proprietor.


Can Oppression Be Unique and General?

By Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns

If we cannot imagine how chickens must feel being grabbed in the middle of the
night by men who are cursing and yelling at them while pitching them into the
crates in which they will travel to the next wave of human terror attacks at the
slaughterhouse, then we should try to imagine ourselves placed helplessly in the
hands of an overpowering extraterrestrial species, to whom our pleas for mercy
sound like nothing more than mere noise to the master race in whose "superior"
minds we are "only animals."
- Karen Davis, The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale

"The garbage dump is crammed with our heads and entrails."
- Rooster narrator of "Cockadoodledoo" by Isaac Bashevis Singer


Eternal Treblinka

Some people will say that treating creatures badly in order to eat them is a far
cry from treating creatures badly simply because you hate them, but Charles
Patterson notes in his book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust, that the psychology of contempt for "inferior life" links the Nazi
mentality to that which allows us to torture and kill billions of nonhuman
animals and millions of human beings with no more concern for them and their
suffering than Hannibal Lecter and Jame Gumb feel for their victims, apart from
the pleasure they derive from the taste of their victims' pain, in Thomas
Harris's book, The Silence of the Lambs. That book says that the plight of the
lambs screaming in the slaughterhouses - the whole human enterprise of
degradation, cruelty, and murder - "will not end, ever" (Harris, 366).

Eternal Treblinka reminds us of all those other slaughterhouses that were
running alongside the human ones under the Nazis - "Around-the-clock killing and
butchering" conducted at Treblinka, Auschwitz, in Dresden, and elsewhere
(Patterson, 129). In their diaries and letters, Nazi officials note
indifferently such things as "huge slaughter of chickens and pigs" (Patterson,
125), and they dote on their meals. One writes to his wife: "The sight of the
dead - including women and children - is not very cheering. Once the cold
weather sets in you'll be getting a goose now and again. There are over 200
chattering around here, as well as cows, calves, pigs, hens and turkeys. We live
like princes. Today, Sunday, we had roast goose (1/4 each). This evening we are
having pigeon" (Patterson, 129).

In Eternal Treblinka, chickens and pigs shriek as they are being cursed and
butchered. Nazis bear their souls in letters and diaries. We read the opposing
testimony of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. A question raised over
and over by those who became vegetarians rather than perpetuate the legacy of
butchery in their own lives, is "How can 'we' do to 'them' what was done to 'us'
and not even recognize it?" Because, says Albert Kaplan, "we have learned
nothing from the Holocaust" (Patterson, 167). Kaplan tells of a visit he made in
Israel to a kibbutz Holocaust museum near Haifa: "Around two hundred feet from
the main entrance to the museum is an Auschwitz for animals from which emanates
a horrible odor that envelops the museum. I mentioned it to the museum
management. Their reaction was not surprising. 'But they are only chickens'"
(Patterson, 166).


Degradation of the Victim

Christa Blanke, a former Lutheran pastor in Germany and founder of the
organization Animals' Angels, cites a link between how we treat animals and
Nazism. First we strip the animals of their dignity - "The degradation of the
victim always precedes a murder" (Patterson, 228). But, we want to know, why do
humans want to degrade and kill? Serial killer Ted Bundy said it wasn't that he
had no feelings of remorse for his victims, but that those feelings were weak
and ephemeral compared to his rapacious emotions (Rule). Naturalist John Muir
wrote that the people he knew enjoyed seeing the passenger pigeons fill the sky,
but they liked shooting and eating them more - "Every shotgun was aimed at them"
(Teale, 46).


Comfort with Cruelty

The Holocaust thus raises questions, and we long for answers. Why, asked Isaac
Bashevis Singer, do we pretend animals don't feel in order to justify our
cruelty, but even more importantly, why do we want to be cruel to animals? Is
comfort with cruelty, taking pleasure in cruelty, a trait we carry from our past
in our genes? Why, when we have the technology to duplicate animal products, do
people insist they have to have meat? Why do we praise technology for developing
substitutes for cruder practices in other areas of life while balking at its use
to end slaughterhouses, which technology can do?


"Just Chickens"

The Holocaust epitomized an attitude, the manifestation of a base will. It is
the attitude that we can do whatever we please, however vicious, if we can get
away with it, because "we" are superior, and "they," whoever they are, are, so
to speak, "just chickens." Paradoxically, therefore, it is possible, indeed
requisite, to make relevant and enlightening comparisons between the Holocaust
and our base treatment of nonhuman animals. We can make comparisons while
agreeing with philosopher, Brian Luke: "My opposition to the institutionalized
exploitation of animals is not based on a comparison between human and animal
treatment, but on a consideration of the abuse of animals in and of itself"
(Luke, 81).

Paradoxically, while the words "Nazi" and "Holocaust" represent unique
historical phenomena, they can transcend these phenomena to function more
broadly. And a broader approach to the Holocaust would appear to hold more
promise for a more enlightened and compassionate future than attempting to
privatize the event to the extent that its only permissible reference is
self-reference. A broader approach provides a more just apprehension of past and
present atrocities, while connecting the Nazis and the Holocaust to the larger
ethical challenges confronting humanity.


Identity or Exclusivity?

In A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the
Present, Native American scholar Ward Churchill writes that the experience of
the Jews under the Nazis is unique "only in the sense that all such phenomena
exhibit unique characteristics. Genocide, as the Nazis practiced it, was never
something suffered exclusively by the Jews, nor were the Nazis singularly guilty
of its practice" (Churchill 1997, 35-36).

One of the many questions that emerge from the current debate about the use of
the Holocaust to illuminate humankind's relationship to billions of nonhuman
animals is the extent to which the outrage of having one's own suffering
compared to that of others centers primarily on issues of identity and
uniqueness or on issues of superiority and privilege. The ownership of superior
and unique suffering has many claimants, but as Isaac Bashevis Singer observed
speaking of chickens, there is no evidence that humans are more important than
chickens (Shenker, 11).


The Fascist Within

There is no evidence, either, that human suffering, or Jewish suffering, is
separate from all other suffering, or that it needs to be kept separate and
superior in order to maintain its identity. But where, it may be asked, is the
evidence that we humans have had enough of inflicting massive preventable
suffering on one another and on the individuals of other species, given that we
know suffering so well, and claim to abhor it? In Eternal Treblinka: Our
Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles Patterson concludes: "the sooner
we put an end to our cruel and violent way of life, the better it will be for
all of us - perpetrators, bystanders, and victims" (232). Who but the Nazi
within us disagrees? If we are going to exterminate someone, let it be the
fascist within.


Conference Information & Registration:
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______________________________________


References

Churchill, Ward. 1997. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Davis, Karen, 2005. The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing
Atrocities. New York: Lantern Books.

Harris, Thomas. 1988. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Luke, Brian. 1996. "Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation." Beyond Animal
Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals. Ed.

Patterson, Charles. 2002. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust. New York: Lantern Books.

Rule, Ann. 1989 (1980). The Stranger Beside Me. New York: Signet.

Shenker, Israel. 1991. "The Man Who Talked Back to God: Isaac Bashevis Singer,
1904-91." The New York Times Book Review, August 11.

Teale, Edwin Way, ed. 1954. The Wilderness World of John Muir.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

______________________________________


KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns , a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment
of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into
the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal
Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and
campaigns. The 2009 Revised Edition of Karen's landmark book Prisoned Chickens,
Poisoned Eggs (first published in 1996) is described by the American Library
Association's Choice magazine as "Riveting . . . brilliant . . . noteworthy for
its breadth and depth." Karen's latest book, published by Lantern Books in 2019,
is For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation - Essays on Chickens, Turkeys,
and Other Domesticated Fowl. Amazon Reviews Praise For the Birds: From
Exploitation to Liberation by Karen Davis, PhD.



--
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don't just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
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