Marxist Animalism
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For some, their taste buds take priority over both the screams of fellow animals and the mental anguish of fellow workers.
https://www.dw.com/en/hitlers-dogs-görings-lions-how-the-nazis-used-and-abused-animals/a-53698708
Jan Mohnhaupt – Tiere im Nationalsozialismus (Animals in National Socialism)
Hitler had millions of people killed, but he loved his dog Blondi. How do you reconcile a love of animals and racial fanaticism?
“For leading Nazis, animal protection and crimes against humanity were not a contradiction in terms,” Mohnhaupt writes
The Nazis also loved people. They didn’t view the groups their state demonized as being people.
So you can’t say it’s love of “animals” vs love of people.
Did camp commandants and staff not love their families? Not play with their children nor kiss their spouses? Of course they did.
“Animals” were graded just as humans were. There was no concern at all for “Jewish” animals in this grading system.
One’s love takes on the colour of one’s thinking. They feared what the enemy would do with the children. Like the mass suicide at Masada, the Japanese families throwing themselves off the mountainside on Okinawa, the suicide of Lady Nii with the baby at Dan no Ura, the killing of baby monkeys by their own mothers in vivisection labs, which so frustrates the vivisectors who hoped to vivisect them, etc.
My grandmother had planned to kill my mother, she said, if the Germans had taken England.
If an “unusual kind of love”, then it applies equally to Blondi, whom Hitler loved, but killed for the same reason.
My mother’s great uncle shot his beloved horse Blackie, to save him from being taken by the army in WW1 and sent into that horror.
It is all irrational then.
Damn all to do with socialism though, when we will be able to make individually and collectively, rational decisions derived from mature reflection upon the circumstances presented by common ownership, for sustainable development rather than driven by the vested interests of food producers, whether plugging meat or veggie alternatives or the imposition of other’s choices upon us.
I have had disgusting brocolli and cheese sausages given to me for breakfast, with little say in the matter, as I don’t do the shopping.
I can’t enjoy a bacon butty or a sardines on toast sandwich, without encountering passive aggression in my own household.
My partner has no problem buying meat for the vicious, foul tempered, spitting, bird murdering, stray cat, currently lieing behind me as I type though.
By the way I was a veggie for years until my BMI showed the same as an undernourished peasant in east asia. I was down to 8 stone.
I had to begin returning to an omniverous diet for health reasons. I am now around the 9 and a half mark.
I know there a lot of fat vegans etc but I am not one of them.
No. It may be wrong, as in my grandmother’s case, but it is reasoned. It is fully right in the case of the monkeys, who have had children seized from their mothers who hear their screams.
My mother’s great uncle was also reasoning that a fatal bullet was better for Blackie than lying disembowelled and/or limbless and in agony and terror on a battlefield.
Similarly, if one believes the war enemy are monsters, as the Japanese imagined the Americans, then that too is rational. The Germans too knew how the Russians treated captured Alsatians, starving them and then using them as living bombs. So their fear for their dogs is also rational.
Emotions will often determine reasoning. One reasons in accordance with one’s ideas.
Furthermore, how can you say it is irrational to opt for a quicker death for someone you love than a lingering and agonising one? The emotional is frequently rational.
You and ALB rationalise (wish to justify) your consumption of flesh by comforting yourselves that the animals on your table are “humanely” killed. You are therefore rationalising in order to soothe your conscience, although I consider you to be wrong. But you are reasoning, even though I consider your reasoning at fault.
However, were you people who felt no need to rationalise your consumption in this way, and who would happily consume animals who have been deliberately tortured (as in the case of the Korean dog-meat industry), then I wouldn’t even speak with you at all.
You cannot compartmentalise things neatly such as “This is rational, this is emotional, never the twain shall meet.”
This is where we get capitalism’s cold science and the cool and disengaged planning of atrocities.
We are equally emotional and rational beings. Our emotions and our reasons are often equally mistaken, but we are not made of separate compartments. Such neatness and estrangement suits a mechanistic mindset but is biologically faulted.
Our ideas are moulded by life, as are our emotions and reactions. Mind is body, with all that entails, and everything comes from the like and dislike experienced by the infant. Everything is connected.
“…were you people who felt no need to rationalise your consumption in this way, and who would happily consume animals who have been deliberately tortured (as in the case of the Korean dog-meat industry), then I wouldn’t even speak with you at all…”
We can widen such a debate into a broader context. We are happy to use the technology you and I are using depends upon the pain and suffering of child workers. As you say everything is connected. Ye without sin, cast the first stone…as scripture says
Social change is coming even under capitalism. Several provinces in China have outlawed dog and cat meat. Across Asia as a whole such consumption is falling. The campaign against eating veal is due to the torture of calves to produce the quality of the meat and despite this, the demand for the product in the US is growing.
Yes, and sensibility toward fellow animals mounts with urbanisation and a more advanced society.
But to return to what I said about the mechanist-compartmentalising mindset, that could be an important reason why Marxist language is a big turn-off for most people.
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