Gordon wrote:
>
>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.
Nobody is making this claim. The point is *not* that anyone who protests cruelty to animals is a Nazi. The point is that protesting cruelty to animals has no bearing on one's politics. One could be an anarchist or a Nazi or anything in between.
I wrote:
>By smearing the Greens with a Nazi paintbrush, anti-environmental
>propagandists hope to convince the general public that Green >politics will
inevitably lead down an authoritarian and misanthropic >path. This is a
ridiculous notion and needs to be challenged >whenever it arises... Yet,
the horror in what I have discovered about >the German experience is the
seemingly untroubled ease with which >a Green spirit of biophilia-- a spirit
I deeply embrace-- can stand >alongside and be integrated in the human heart
with the genocidal >spirit of the holocaust... (Steve Chase)
If your politics aren't explicitly pro-people, then a pro-animal or pro-nature stance can easily become anti-people. (And pro-people means everyone, not just some "ideal type," as in Hitler and Singer.)
--Ted Dace