When I typed "Death Camps" into google, this image came up. Proving the point precisely - animal cruelty is analogous to Nazi death camps.
As a great grandchild of a Nazi-Occupied-German Jew, it is preposterous to me that anyone in their right mind can claim sanity while at the same time, deny that the Holocaust ever took place. Rejecting the idea that a historically horrific event took place is just as ignorant as claiming that trees do not exist, or that the internet was never invented. “It’s not because they waged an expansionist war, and lost it, that Germans of a particular generation are still regarded as standing a little outside humanity, as having to do or be something special before they can be reemitted to the human fold. They lost heir humanity, in our eyes, because of certain willed ignorance on their part. …Ignorance may have been a useful survival mechanism, but that is an excuse, which, with admirable moral rigor, we refuse to accept” (64).
The Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe were captured by the Nazis like dogs are snatched by the dog catcher, they were robbed of any claim to identity that they may have had (names, belongings, family) like milking goats are given numbers rather than names, they were shoved into cargo holds with barely enough air to breath, like puppies at a puppy mill, the were experimented on and tortured, like the Japanese Quail are used for vivisection, and finally, they were euthanized or shot, just like any animal that is no longer of use to us as a human race. “Denunciation of the camps reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouses that it is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for the comparison I am about to make…Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of…” (66,68). Just like the Nazis the vivisection experimenters feel superior to the animals that they dissect, the Nazis gave zero respect to the Jews, merely because they felt as if they were higher, more advanced beings. “Two patterns of suffering are morally equivalent if there are no morally decisive reasons for preferring one to the other” (172).
Seal Camp J.M Coatzee’s Elizabeth Costello said, “It’s that I no longer know where I am…is it possible…that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? …Everyday I see that evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins…I look into [the owners’ eyes] and see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself…this is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you” (Coatzee 69)?
In agreement with David Sztybel, “even if anything can be compared to the Holocaust in some respects, nothing can be equated with this historical phenomenon,” yet at the same time, comparing the event to animal cruelty by no means “trivializes what happened to the victims of the Nazis” (732, 733). The comparison of animal cruelty to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust is dead on and should arouse awareness in those who, like the Nazis, are denying that anything wrong is occurring. It is.
http://animalsmatter.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/beijing-cat-death-camps/
http://www.outofbox.in/worlds-best-photographers/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/china-beijing-cat-death-camps.php
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