Doug Henwood:
> >> Well, given Alex Cockburn's rigorous fact-checking standards, I can't
> >> believe he'd just go off and say something without evidence!
Gordon Fitch wrote:
> >There's evidence and then there's evidence. No doubt one
> >can turn up a few Nazis who believed in vegetarianism; this
> >does not make vegetarianism a Nazi program. I'm surprised I
> >have to say that.
Dace:
> No, vegetarianism does not make you a Nazi. But Naziism is closely linked
> with "animal rights" and vegetarianism and ecology. To learn all about this
> connection, see "Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust," in
> Anthrozoos, 5 (1), 1992, as well as correspondence over the following year.
> The authors, Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax review a wide variety of material
> on this issue. This is Cockburn's chief source on this topic in Sue Coe's
> *Dead Meat*.
>
> Regarding the links between Nazis and Greens, here's an excerpt from an
> article by Steve Chase in the October '99 issue of Z Magazine:
>
> ***Hitler, a long time vegetarian, called for legislation to protect animal
> rights, arguing that "in the new Reich cruelty toward animals should no
> longer exist." ...
By the standards being apparently being used here, because the Nazis were concerned about smoking and cancer, any effort to reduce smoking in order to reduce cancer is therefore "closely linked" to Naziism.
Again, I'm surprised I have to explain these things in a mailing list where the names and works of Marx, Adorno, and Heidegger are bandied about, but because A claims interest in X and B claims interest in X does not mean in itself that A is "strongly linked" to B for any meaning of "strongly linked" I'm familiar with. Perhaps I should have studied medieval and hermetic philosophies more closely; I'm begining to feel as if we're dealing with alchemical and astrological relations here.
If someone wants to show a causative or genealogical relation between, oh, Gautama, Hitler, George Bernard Shaw, and Food Not Bombs, please, do it. Many of the kids who fought the cops in Seattle (and here in New York City more recently) are vegans, and need to know they're toying with the Darker Forces, when they could be crushing capitalism by gobbling Big Macs. --
Gordon