A grotesque comparison

Editorial

The way humans treat animals is the same as the way the Nazis treated Jews. In fact, the two cases are directly linked - Hitler used high-tech killing techniques learned from Chicago slaughterhouses as part of his Final Solution and the meat industry continues to use the same processes.

That is the thesis, in a nutshell, of a book being released this month, titled Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. The author, Dr. Charles Patterson, based his title on a line from the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story "The Letter Writer," in which a Holocaust survivor befriends a mouse, who soon dies:

"In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of his life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. 'What do they know - all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.' "

Singer's own dedication to animal rights is given much play in the book, but there is no leeway given for the fact that the title derives from a work of fiction and the context may not be transferable.

Patterson, undeterred, goes on to criticize "human supremacy," indicating that he makes little distinction between the life of a human and the life of a pig. He directly compares human slavery through history to current captivity of animals. He equates the eugenics movement with animal breeders cross-breeding better classes of animals. Most disturbingly and unforgivably, he repeatedly juxtaposes the grotesque imagery of the Chicago stockyards - with its squealing pigs and brutal, routinized death - with the Nazi death camps.

The ideological intent of the book is to take the universal disgust for fascism and sympathy for its victims and transfer it to the ongoing campaign for humane treatment of animals. Comparing the mass murder of humans to the industrialized processing of meat animals is intended to raise human consciousness about our treatment of animals. Instead, it succeeds only in massively degrading the victims of the Holocaust and turning sensible readers, in their revulsion, against the author and his thesis.

It is true that our treatment of animals is often cruel, inhumane and appalling. It should be reformed. But comparing it with the Holocaust is animal rights extremism at its ideological worst.

The early part of the book deals with the methods people have used to dehumanize other people, referring to enemies as savages, brutes or beasts. Patterson points out the methods the Nazis used in propaganda films, which equated Jews with rats and, using a more recent case, the manner in which Hutus depicted Tutsis as insects. This is all part of an intellectual process to make it easier and more acceptable to kill the now-dehumanized enemy. But it is also a facile thesis. Yes, that dehumanizing propaganda is intended to reduce sympathy for and incite hatred against groups. But it can only succeed in a situation that is already ripe for murder, something Patterson doesn't acknowledge.

The author makes much of the fact that Henry Ford got his ideas for assembly-line production from his visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse as a young man. He also notes that Hitler got his ideas for assembly-line killing from Ford's industrial model. Neither of these facts are new. And if they were, so what? Patterson's emphasis on the process of killing, rather than the human motivations behind it, is one of the failures of the book.

Moreover, the implication is that the Holocaust continues today in the form of the meat industry. It is a grotesque appropriation of history.

Unfortunately, such a thesis is likely to be met with interest in some quarters. In a world where people are seeking answers from the likes of David Icke, and animal rights extremists threaten to kill people to save animals, there may just be a place for Eternal Treblinka.

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