tree hugging nazis (was Peter Singer & Vegetarian Dogs)

Dace edace at flinthills.com
Tue Mar 7 21:09:14 PST 2000



>Dace:
>
>> 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." ...

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



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