That moment when your veganism goes so hard you commit a hate crime on the internet implicitly comparing Jews to cattle
Edit: I’m from Poland, the country where most of the Holocaust happened - this is where the Jewish population was the highest and where Germans build their death camps. We read about it extensively at school, including eyewitness accounts describing the atrocities involved in this horrific campaign of human extermination, from the home of the Jew, to the ghetto, to the transport train, to the camp, to the gas chamber and to the furnace. Many of us heard those stories from our grandparents, of their neighbors being humiliated and taken away, ghettos liquidated, and public executions. I don’t know what kind of deplorable scumbag one has to be to equate factory farming with the Holocaust.
Yes, it’s a tasteless comparison. I’m a German. Hello neighbor, nice to live in peace.
The comparison also falls flat because while the Holocaust was a genocide, meant to eradicate, factory farming is the polar opposite.
The population size of factory farmed animals is usually way above natural levels, because we farm them. A philosopher even called it an evolutionary win for the farmed species (which does not justify any harm done to individuals).
There are more ways to express ‘very bad’ than comparing to the Holocaust, and many reasons not to, if you understand it.
Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.
“I totally embrace the comparison to the Holocaust. I feel that violence and suffering of innocents are unjust. I believe that the abuse of humans and animals and the earth come from the same need to dominate others. I feel that I could not save my family, my people, but each time I talk about cruelty to animals and being vegetarian I might be saving another life. After knowing what I know about the Holocaust and about animal exploitation I cannot be anything else but an animal rights advocate.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
“I believe in what Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, ‘In their behavior towards creatures, all men are Nazis.’ Human beings see their own oppression vividly when they are the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.” [tweet this]
-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor
“What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? 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 [the animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” [tweet this]
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor
“I spent my childhood years in the Warsaw Ghetto where almost my entire family was murdered along with about 350,000 other Polish Jews. People sometimes will ask me whether that experience had anything to do with my work for animals. It didn’t have a little to do with my work for animals, it had everything to do with my work for animals.”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
“When I see cages crammed withchickens from battery farmsthrown on trucks like bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced onto trains leaving for the death camps). When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates.” [tweet this]
-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
“I dedicate my mother’s grave to geese. My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.”
-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”
“In 1975, after I immigrated to the United States, I happened to visit a slaughterhouse, where I saw terrified animals subjected to horrendous crowding conditions while awaiting their deaths. Just as my family members were in the notorious Treblinka death camp. I saw the same efficient and emotionless killing routine as in Treblinka, I saw the neat piles of hearts, hooves, and other body parts. So reminiscent of the piles of Jewish hair, glasses and shoes in Treblinka.”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
“Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don’t matter. You can also compare the two holocausts this way. […] Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau.”
You’re right, it’s so much fucking worse than the Holocaust by orders of magnitude. At least the Nazis weren’t raping women to keep the Holocaust perpetually going.
This is just dishonest. The comparison is made specifically because of #2. It’s the attempt to connect emotions and judgements people have about Nazi atrocities with animal slaughter. That’s also why you quoted a Shoa survivor in defense of this wreck of a comparison.
May I invite you to watch this video of Alex Hershaft. He is probably one of the first, if not the first, persons who made the connection between the Jewish holocaust and what he himself calls the animal holocaust. In this talk he talks about his experience in the Warschau ghetto, his family in Treblinka and his later experience with slaughterhouses. Drawing quite a few parallels between the two.
*implicitly comparing the treatment of Jews during the holocaust to the treatment of cattle today
also, you can compare two things without equating them
I think if you actually cared about the words you wrote, you wouldn’t have used them as the basis of a lazy strawman to win an argument on the internet against veganism
The problem is agribusiness. They treat animals with no respect in a terrible a terrible manner, unlike most small-scale farms where the farmers often have a personal relationship with their livestock.
Factory farms whether it be chicken, hog or cattle often end up putting the animals on a feedlot or in a high density chicken farm with literally millions of birds under one roof. This leads to a slaughterhouse that is a horror show. It was a book written a hundred years ago called The jungle, look it up. It’s been an issue for a long time and it is inhumane.
It’s not to say that killing animals is pretty, but it can be done in a more humane fashion starting by respecting the lives of the animals while they are alive.
The flip side is that if we were to actually close down all of the farms and raise no livestock for me, there’s a good chance that these species will functionally go extinct.
I don’t care about arguing about veganism. Just stop bringing up stuff like this. Also, do you think calling something a “modern holocaust” is not a comparison in terms of scale of harm? As opposed to every other time those words are used?
Edit: If you want to argue for veganism, stop bringing up Shoah. It’s disgusting, downplaying the severity of the genocide, and earns you no favors with the general population. It has negative convincing power.
It’s 90 billion every year. If their suffering is 15000 less significant, that’s one holocaust a year, every year, since many years. Why are you using Shoah, if holocaust is so obviously only one thing? And why are the voices of holocaust victims/survivors/relatives totally fine to silence? Many have made that comparison, shouldn’t they know best whether it’s comparable???
You are correct however that this argument is utterly stupid and useless to make, esp. online, where there is zero context.
That their suffering matters as much as that of farm animals? That’s a disgusting preposition. If you compare those two things in the scale of harm, that’s an obvious conclusion.
Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.
“I totally embrace the comparison to the Holocaust. I feel that violence and suffering of innocents are unjust. I believe that the abuse of humans and animals and the earth come from the same need to dominate others. I feel that I could not save my family, my people, but each time I talk about cruelty to animals and being vegetarian I might be saving another life. After knowing what I know about the Holocaust and about animal exploitation I cannot be anything else but an animal rights advocate.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
“I believe in what Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, ‘In their behavior towards creatures, all men are Nazis.’ Human beings see their own oppression vividly when they are the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.” [tweet this]
-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor
“What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? 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 [the animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” [tweet this]
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor
“I spent my childhood years in the Warsaw Ghetto where almost my entire family was murdered along with about 350,000 other Polish Jews. People sometimes will ask me whether that experience had anything to do with my work for animals. It didn’t have a little to do with my work for animals, it had everything to do with my work for animals.”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
“When I see cages crammed withchickens from battery farmsthrown on trucks like bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced onto trains leaving for the death camps). When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates.” [tweet this]
-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
“I dedicate my mother’s grave to geese. My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.”
-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”
“In 1975, after I immigrated to the United States, I happened to visit a slaughterhouse, where I saw terrified animals subjected to horrendous crowding conditions while awaiting their deaths. Just as my family members were in the notorious Treblinka death camp. I saw the same efficient and emotionless killing routine as in Treblinka, I saw the neat piles of hearts, hooves, and other body parts. So reminiscent of the piles of Jewish hair, glasses and shoes in Treblinka.”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
“Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don’t matter. You can also compare the two holocausts this way. […] Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau.”
You can find any representative of any group with any belief. It proves nothing - it’s just one guy, and plenty of Jews eat meat everyday and would consider his words insulting, the majority of Holocaust survivors included.
I feel like a holocaust survivor should have a way better idea of whether these things are comparable, rather than a non-vegan, non-holocaust survivor on the internet, no? Anyway, here’s more voices:
Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.
“I totally embrace the comparison to the Holocaust. I feel that violence and suffering of innocents are unjust. I believe that the abuse of humans and animals and the earth come from the same need to dominate others. I feel that I could not save my family, my people, but each time I talk about cruelty to animals and being vegetarian I might be saving another life. After knowing what I know about the Holocaust and about animal exploitation I cannot be anything else but an animal rights advocate.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
“I believe in what Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, ‘In their behavior towards creatures, all men are Nazis.’ Human beings see their own oppression vividly when they are the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.” [tweet this]
-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor
“What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? 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 [the animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” [tweet this]
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor
“I spent my childhood years in the Warsaw Ghetto where almost my entire family was murdered along with about 350,000 other Polish Jews. People sometimes will ask me whether that experience had anything to do with my work for animals. It didn’t have a little to do with my work for animals, it had everything to do with my work for animals.”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
“When I see cages crammed withchickens from battery farmsthrown on trucks like bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced onto trains leaving for the death camps). When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates.” [tweet this]
-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
“I dedicate my mother’s grave to geese. My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.”
-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”
“In 1975, after I immigrated to the United States, I happened to visit a slaughterhouse, where I saw terrified animals subjected to horrendous crowding conditions while awaiting their deaths. Just as my family members were in the notorious Treblinka death camp. I saw the same efficient and emotionless killing routine as in Treblinka, I saw the neat piles of hearts, hooves, and other body parts. So reminiscent of the piles of Jewish hair, glasses and shoes in Treblinka.”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
“Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don’t matter. You can also compare the two holocausts this way. […] Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau.”
“What I’m asking them to do is change their lifestyle three times a day,” he explained. “It’s not like supporting gay, women’s or civil rights, where all they have to do is stop discriminating.”
“There aren’t that many people willing to listen to this kind of presentation because it doesn’t leave them indifferent,” he said. “It’s not something you just do casually, like your typical TED talk.”
Even in his own view of himself he isn’t well received and his views are controversial and difficult to accept.
Here you have a holocaust survivor who compares what the Nazis did to the jews to what we do to animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. His words. Never does he equate a cow to a Jew, but he recognizes that both are living breathing beings who don’t want to suffer and who want to live. He gets that it is hard for you to accept that, because if you would fully accept it you would probably have to give up consuming animal products in order to not feel like a massive hypocrite. Is he wrong though?
No. It makes him an absolute minority and not representative of the general demographic of Holocaust survivors. Which was my point.
You can find black people who are white supremacists, women who say universal suffrage was a mistake, any group can have people who have fringe positions, even ones that denigrate them. Finding a guy who believes what you believe but belongs to a discussed demographic is tokenism and has no place in any serious discussion.
Fair enough. But sometimes a minority can be right and a majority can be wrong. That is why we understand arguments based on number of believers to be a fallacy. So are you saying that this guy’s comparison makes no sense? Or are you just making an argumentum ad populum?
Furthermore, Dr. Alex Hershaft isn’t some whacko fringe lunatic. He’s had a pretty impressive career. Please just listen to what he has to say and I’d be happy to hear if you have any substantial counter argument to the comparisons he draws.
That moment when your veganism goes so hard you commit a hate crime on the internet implicitly comparing Jews to cattle
Edit: I’m from Poland, the country where most of the Holocaust happened - this is where the Jewish population was the highest and where Germans build their death camps. We read about it extensively at school, including eyewitness accounts describing the atrocities involved in this horrific campaign of human extermination, from the home of the Jew, to the ghetto, to the transport train, to the camp, to the gas chamber and to the furnace. Many of us heard those stories from our grandparents, of their neighbors being humiliated and taken away, ghettos liquidated, and public executions. I don’t know what kind of deplorable scumbag one has to be to equate factory farming with the Holocaust.
Yes, it’s a tasteless comparison. I’m a German. Hello neighbor, nice to live in peace.
The comparison also falls flat because while the Holocaust was a genocide, meant to eradicate, factory farming is the polar opposite.
The population size of factory farmed animals is usually way above natural levels, because we farm them. A philosopher even called it an evolutionary win for the farmed species (which does not justify any harm done to individuals).
There are more ways to express ‘very bad’ than comparing to the Holocaust, and many reasons not to, if you understand it.
Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
-Gary Yourosky
You’re right, it’s so much fucking worse than the Holocaust by orders of magnitude. At least the Nazis weren’t raping women to keep the Holocaust perpetually going.
If you said that in Germany, you’d probably get arrested.
holocaust
hŏl′ə-kôst″, hō′lə-
noun
This is just dishonest. The comparison is made specifically because of #2. It’s the attempt to connect emotions and judgements people have about Nazi atrocities with animal slaughter. That’s also why you quoted a Shoa survivor in defense of this wreck of a comparison.
May I invite you to watch this video of Alex Hershaft. He is probably one of the first, if not the first, persons who made the connection between the Jewish holocaust and what he himself calls the animal holocaust. In this talk he talks about his experience in the Warschau ghetto, his family in Treblinka and his later experience with slaughterhouses. Drawing quite a few parallels between the two.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=f7dZv43A0g0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
*implicitly comparing the treatment of Jews during the holocaust to the treatment of cattle today
also, you can compare two things without equating them
I think if you actually cared about the words you wrote, you wouldn’t have used them as the basis of a lazy strawman to win an argument on the internet against veganism
The problem is agribusiness. They treat animals with no respect in a terrible a terrible manner, unlike most small-scale farms where the farmers often have a personal relationship with their livestock.
Factory farms whether it be chicken, hog or cattle often end up putting the animals on a feedlot or in a high density chicken farm with literally millions of birds under one roof. This leads to a slaughterhouse that is a horror show. It was a book written a hundred years ago called The jungle, look it up. It’s been an issue for a long time and it is inhumane.
It’s not to say that killing animals is pretty, but it can be done in a more humane fashion starting by respecting the lives of the animals while they are alive.
The flip side is that if we were to actually close down all of the farms and raise no livestock for me, there’s a good chance that these species will functionally go extinct.
Small-scale farms still needlessly kill animals for profit.
We can just eat plants.
I don’t care about arguing about veganism. Just stop bringing up stuff like this. Also, do you think calling something a “modern holocaust” is not a comparison in terms of scale of harm? As opposed to every other time those words are used?
Edit: If you want to argue for veganism, stop bringing up Shoah. It’s disgusting, downplaying the severity of the genocide, and earns you no favors with the general population. It has negative convincing power.
It’s 90 billion every year. If their suffering is 15000 less significant, that’s one holocaust a year, every year, since many years. Why are you using Shoah, if holocaust is so obviously only one thing? And why are the voices of holocaust victims/survivors/relatives totally fine to silence? Many have made that comparison, shouldn’t they know best whether it’s comparable???
You are correct however that this argument is utterly stupid and useless to make, esp. online, where there is zero context.
I’m still missing the part where it’s equating Jews to farm animals.
That their suffering matters as much as that of farm animals? That’s a disgusting preposition. If you compare those two things in the scale of harm, that’s an obvious conclusion.
You’re the one putting scale in there
Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
-Gary Yourosky
Holocaust survivor likens treatment of farm animals to modern-day Shoah
You can find any representative of any group with any belief. It proves nothing - it’s just one guy, and plenty of Jews eat meat everyday and would consider his words insulting, the majority of Holocaust survivors included.
I feel like a holocaust survivor should have a way better idea of whether these things are comparable, rather than a non-vegan, non-holocaust survivor on the internet, no? Anyway, here’s more voices: Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”
-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor
-Gary Yourosky
Try reading the article.
“What I’m asking them to do is change their lifestyle three times a day,” he explained. “It’s not like supporting gay, women’s or civil rights, where all they have to do is stop discriminating.”
“There aren’t that many people willing to listen to this kind of presentation because it doesn’t leave them indifferent,” he said. “It’s not something you just do casually, like your typical TED talk.”
Even in his own view of himself he isn’t well received and his views are controversial and difficult to accept.
So? Does that proof him wrong?
Here you have a holocaust survivor who compares what the Nazis did to the jews to what we do to animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. His words. Never does he equate a cow to a Jew, but he recognizes that both are living breathing beings who don’t want to suffer and who want to live. He gets that it is hard for you to accept that, because if you would fully accept it you would probably have to give up consuming animal products in order to not feel like a massive hypocrite. Is he wrong though?
No. It makes him an absolute minority and not representative of the general demographic of Holocaust survivors. Which was my point.
You can find black people who are white supremacists, women who say universal suffrage was a mistake, any group can have people who have fringe positions, even ones that denigrate them. Finding a guy who believes what you believe but belongs to a discussed demographic is tokenism and has no place in any serious discussion.
Fair enough. But sometimes a minority can be right and a majority can be wrong. That is why we understand arguments based on number of believers to be a fallacy. So are you saying that this guy’s comparison makes no sense? Or are you just making an argumentum ad populum?
Furthermore, Dr. Alex Hershaft isn’t some whacko fringe lunatic. He’s had a pretty impressive career. Please just listen to what he has to say and I’d be happy to hear if you have any substantial counter argument to the comparisons he draws.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=f7dZv43A0g0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.