Down the Rabbit Hole into the World of Animal Rights
A few things:
1. I updated my vegan shoe pinterest with some cool vegan shoes such as these:
“save one life, save the world”.
The similarities to the things I saw in the slaughterhouse videos and in the trucks thanks to the youtube videos of Toronto Pig Save have really been haunting me with how similar they seem to the holocaust. Gas Chambers. Cattle Cars. Horrible experiments on animals. The dark barren barns chickens and pigs, for example, live in before being slaughtered.
The moment I decided not to look away and “bore witness” was the moment everything changed. Now I feel like I want to see more, to know what is really happening. Now all these extreme animal rights people’s tirades are really making sense!
When I learned about the holocaust in middle school I read a lot of books about it…in my typical, disturbed and depressed yet can’t look away fashion. I always remember thinking, how could this have happened only 50 years ago? It didn’t make sense. I looked around me and didn’t see evil people who were capable of doing anything like that. It seemed like a blip on the radar. And yet I imagined myself, being half Jewish, in that situation and tried to make it feel real.
Now I see that those behaviors are still in place but they are hidden from our view…in the slaughterhouses of the world. In the video I mentioned above, they talk about how evil is often just no one taking responsibility…like in a bureaucracy where normal people take orders but don’t want to take responsibility for what they are doing–that’s how evil happens. Exactly!
Clicking around, I found this Holocaust Comparison Project, a photo essay by David Sztybel, that the video is responding to. It makes fascinating and disturbing points. The same patterns of violence that existed in the Holocaust are very much alive and well.
At the end of the photo essay there is this post script:
Edgar Kupfer was a survivor of the Dachau death camp. After his liberation, he furtively scrawled the following message on the wall of a hospital barrack:
Wow.
I understand the Holocaust is an extremely sensitive subject. But like they say in the video, by discussing the past, we can learn from the past.
Your thoughts? Do you feel that you know your motivations for being vegan or vegetarian on a deep level or do you sometimes question? What do you think about the Holocaust Comparison Project?