Book Review: Charles Patterson’s The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
New York: Lantern Books, 2002, 280 pp.
Reviewed by Dr. Steven Best
Associate Professor, Departments of Humanities and Philosophy
University of Texas, El Paso

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Since the nineteenth century, geographers have developed theories of “environmental determinism” that reject the humanist interpretation of history as constituted solely through human-to-human interactions. By contrast, they emphasized that environmental factors such as physical terrain and climate determined psychological outlooks and temperaments, cultural characteristics, social organization, and historical change. Once introduced into historiography as a crucial perspective mediated with other perspectives such as economics, class, technology, and culture in a non- reductionist manner that does not ignore the influence of social factors and
the ability of humans to shape their environments as well, “environmental determinism” (read: “conditioning”) greatly bolsters our abilities to understand biological evolution, social development, and human behavior.

While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions, the environmental determinism approach typically fails to emphasize the crucial role that animals play in human history, as well as how the human exploitation of animals is a key cause of hierarchy, social conflict, and environmental breakdown. A core thesis of what I call “animal standpoint theory” is that animals have been key driving and shaping forces of human thought, psychology, moral and social life, and history overall. More specifically, animal standpoint theory argues that the oppression of human over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal.

In this context, Charles Patterson’s recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, articulates the animal standpoint in a powerful form with revolutionary implications. The main argument of Eternal Treblinka is that the human domination of animals, such as it emerged some ten thousand years ago with the rise of agricultural society, was the first hierarchical domination and laid the groundwork for patriarchy, slavery, warfare, genocide, and other systems of violence and power. A key implication of Patterson’s theory is that human liberation is implausible if disconnected from animal liberation, and thus humanism -- a speciesist philosophy that constructs a hierarchal relationship privileging superior humans over inferior animals and reduces animals to resources for human use -- collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions.

Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument in three parts. In Part I, he demonstrates that animal exploitation and speciesism have direct and profound connections to slavery, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In Part II, he shows how these connections exist not only in the realm of ideology – as conceptual systems of justifying and underpinning domination and hierarchy – but also in systems of technology, such that the tools and techniques humans devised for the rationalized mass confinement and slaughter of animals were mobilized against human groups for the same ends. Finally, in the fascinating interviews and narratives of Part III, Patterson describes how personal experience with German Nazism prompted Jewish to take antithetical paths: whereas most retreated to an insular identity and dogmatic emphasis on the singularity of Nazi evil and its tragic experience, others recognized the profound similarities between how Nazis treated their human captives and how humanity as a whole treats other animals, an epiphany that led them to adopt vegetarianism, to become advocates for the animals, and develop a far broader and more inclusive ethic informed by universal compassion for all suffering and oppressed beings.

The Origins of Hierarchy

"As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras

It is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy involves human domination over animals. Patterson’s thesis stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that the domination over nature is fundamental to the domination over other humans. It differs as well from the social ecology position of Murray Bookchin that domination over humans brings about alienation from the natural world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and institutions, and is the root of the long-standing western goal to “dominate” nature. In the case of Marxists, anarchists, and so many others, theorists typically don’t even mention human domination of animals, let alone assign it causal primacy or significance. In Patterson’s model, however, the human subjugation of animals is the first form of hierarchy and it paves the way for all other systems of domination such as include patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. As he puts it, “the exploitation of animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people committed against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples.”

Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons.

The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females.

In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation.

As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.

Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. “Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species,” Patterson writes, “our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them.” Whether the conquerors are european imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims – Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates – with opprobrious terms such as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.”

Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as animals, they could be hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed. The connections are clear: “For a civilization built on the exploitation and slaughter of animals, the `lower’ and more degraded the human victims are, the easier it is to kill them.” Thus, colonialism, as Patterson describes, was a “natural extension of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.” For just as humans had subdued animals with their superior intelligence and technologies, so many Europeans believed that the white race had proven its superiority by bringing the “lower races” under its command.

There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and racism in the elevation of white male rationality to the touchstone of moral worth. The arguments European colonialists used to legitimate exploiting Africans – that they were less than human and inferior to white Europeans in ability to reason – are the very same justifications humans use to trap, hunt, confine, and kill animals. Once western norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using non-human animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing odd, different, exotic, and eccentric peoples and types as non- or sub- human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from humans was also used to ostracize blacks, women, and numerous other groups from “humanity.” The oppression of blacks, women, and animals alike was grounded in an argument that biological inferiority predestined them for servitude. In the major strain of western thought, alleged rational beings (i.e., elite, white, western males) pronounce that the Other (i.e., women, people of color, animals) is deficient in rationality in ways crucial to their nature and status, and therefore are deemed and treated as inferior, subhuman, or nonhuman. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the basis of skin color, and the sexist mentality splits men and women into greater and lower classes of beings, the speciesist outlook demeans and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the biological continuum into the antipodes of humans and animals. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, and sexism is the product of a bigoted male supremacism, so speciesism stems from and informs a violent human supremacism -- namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise or, more generously, within the moral boundaries of welfarism and stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Chistianithy left behind.

By the nineteenth century, exploiting a corrupt understanding of Darwin’s natural selection theory, Social Darwinists promoted the pernicious ideology of “Might is Right” in order to frame class domination as something natural and inevitable rather than contingent and subject to change. A variant of Social Darwinism was used by Hitler and German Nazis to justify their genocidal campaigns’. Ultimately derived from speciesism, the Might is Right view continues to prop up human barbarity toward animals, and it has sedimented into a bland, unreflective “common sense” consent to human supremacism and the ongoing pogrom against animals.

Animal Breeding and Eugenics

“Human rule over the lower creatures provided the mental analogue in which many political and social arrangements were based.” Keith Thomas

After analyzing how the domination of animals provides the conceptual model for the domination of humans, Patterson turns, in Part II, to the task of identifying the linkages between animal breeding and eugenics measures such as sterilization, euthanasia killings. Still more provocatively, he unearths the hidden connections between the industrialized killing of animals in early twentieth century slaughterhouses and the bureaucratic and technological machinery used by the German Nazis during the Holocaust.

Some readers may be surprised to learn the full extent to which the US (most notably, the “educated” and “liberal” elite as well as the mainstream press) was poisoned by racist ideologies throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly, a virulent racism initiated, perpetuated, and legitimated slavery and the genocidal war against the Native American nations, but racism also shaped the thinking of scientists and elites in a way that decisively influenced the thinking and policies of Hitler and German Nazism.

By the early nineteenth century, Patterson notes, western “sciences” often were little more than crude justifications for racism, colonialism, and Eurocentrism, as the facts of human nature were distorted to construct a hierarchy that extended from white Europeans at the top to dark-skinned peoples at the bottom. Appallingly, major scientists of the day, such as Charles Lyell and Georges Cuvier, trafficked in racist crudities. Cuvier, for instance, described Africans as “the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast.” Ernst Haeckel, the esteemed German philosopher and biologist who coined the term “ecology,” averred that non-western races are “psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans.” With chilling implications, Haeckel concluded, “we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.” Paul Broca, a French pathologist and anthropologist, spawned the popular pseudo-science of “craniometry” which (mis)measured human skulls to support the thesis that brain size was related to ntelligence; in a paradigmatic example of how politics and ideology can derail, betray, and literally deform the scientific enterprise, Broca and others employed crude and arbitrary methods to “prove” the presumption that white Europeans had the largest skull size, and so clearly were the highest specimens of humanity.

More insidiously still, eugenics became hugely influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the US and Germany. The attempt to manipulate and “improve” the human gene stock originated in early agricultural society through attempts to breed the largest and strongest animals. The Nazi vilification of huge swaths of human society, including blacks, Jews, and those deemed intellectually and physically “unfit” or “inferior,” was dependent upon dehumanization by identifying them with animals. Eugenics had real consequences in the US, for by the 1920s tens of thousands of people had been sterilized. These campaigns were a direct and formidable influence on German Nazism. Hitler studied US policies and ultimately was inspired to surpass the pioneering lead of the US by pushing eugenics to its ultimate conclusions -- to the “final solution” realized in the massacre of millions of undesirables Hitler likened to animals, insects, and even bacteria.

A Tale of Two Holocausts

“We have been at war with the other creatures of this earth ever since the first human hunter set forth with spear into the primeval forest. Human imperialism has everywhere enslaved, oppressed, murdered, and mutilated the animal peoples. All around us lie the slave camps we have built for our fellow creatures, factory farms and vivisection laboratories, Dachaus and Buchenwalds for the conquered species. We slaughter animals for our food, force them to perform silly tricks for our delectation, gun them down and stick hooks in them in the name of sport. We have torn up the wild places where once they made their homes. Speciesism is more deeply entrenched within us even than sexism, and that is deep enough.” Ronnie Lee, founder of the Animal Liberation Front

Patterson argues that the US roots of German Nazism grew not only through the widespread influence of eugenics, but also through the industrialized slaughter of animals. Both ideologically (racism and eugenics) and technologically (mass production/destruction models), Nazis took their inspiration from the US, such that “the road to Auschwitz traveled through America” and ultimately “begins at the slaughterhouse.”

More than anyone else in the US, automobile mogul Henry Ford helped paved the way to Auschwitz and Dachau. Ford was a rabid anti-Semite who began in 1920 to publish screeds against the Jews through his weekly newspaper. Ford organized his columns as a book and The International Jew sold a half-million copies in the US and Europe and “became the bible of the postwar anti-Semitic movement.” Hitler extolled Ford’s book and disseminated it widely among officers and troops. Hitler regarded Ford as a pioneer, visionary, and comrade, declaring that “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration” – so much so that he even kept a life-size portrait of Ford in his office. Ford proudly received the honors bestowed on him, and a Ford subsidiary company was a major supplier of vehicles for the German army.

In addition to his virulent anti-Semitism, Ford helped to incubate German Nazism in another key way through the development of industrial technology methods. The same techniques that Ford pioneered for the mass production of automobiles were used by Nazis for the administration of mass killing. A crucial but little-known fact, however, is that these techniques were first developed in the slaughterhouses for the kind of streamlined killing and disassembly of animal bodies such as were required to satisfy growing consumer demand for meat. In 1865, amidst the colossal stockyards of Chicago, meatpackers introduced the conveyor belt to increase the speed and efficiency of the killing. Slaughterhouses pioneered the division of labor techniques – whereby a grisly team of “knockers,” “splitters,” “boners,” and “trimmers” specialized in different tasks --used for all subsequent forms of mass production.

Ford’s visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse inspired his adaptation of assembly line and division of labor techniques to churn out an endless procession of identical automobiles. But the technological grafting did not end there. “As the twentieth century would demonstrate,” Patterson observes, “it was but one step from the industrialized killing of American slaughterhouses to Nazi Germany’s assembly-line mass murder.” Thus, historians should look not to Henry Ford as the innovator of mass production, but rather to meatpacking giants Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour.

To facilitate their brutal butchery, Nazis aimed to make killing people seem like slaughtering animals. The “Might is Right” ideology that humans employ to justify their brutality against animals was central to Nazi ideology, for, as Hitler stated: “Man owes everything that is of importance of the principle of struggle and to one race [Aryan race] which has carried itself forward successfully. Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes.” Hitler’s basic outlook was that nature is ruled by the law of struggle, and he summarized his worldview in this way: “He who does not possess power loses the right to life.”

In the rationalized production systems of Chicago and Auschwitz, the goal is speed, efficiency, and maximized killing, and the process unfolds through a division of labor with workers specializing in different tasks. Similarly, from transportation to gassing, by way of a gigantic social production line, Nazis tried to keep the movement of prisoners constant, such that as quickly and smoothly as possible one group followed another to their doom. As with slaughterhouses, the sick and lame were cleared away. Both animals and humans were crammed together and transported in mass in rail cars to their final destination. The Nazis shipped Jews to their death in cattle cars, they temporarily unloaded them in slaughterhouses where they were confined in animal pens, and then dispatched them to their death through the same rail lines paths used to transport and slaughter animals.

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost

“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society." Arthur Conan Doyle

“The vast majority of Holocaust survivors are carnivores, no more concerned about animals’ suffering than were the Germans concerned about Jews’ suffering. What does it all mean? I will tell you. It means that we have learned nothing from the Holocaust.” Arthur Kaplan

By this point in Patterson’s narrative, many readers may be offended by the audacity of comparing the suffering of animals and human beings, but Patterson disarms this speciesist objection quite effectively in the third section of Eternal Treblinka. Here, often using original research and interviews, he discusses the experiences of numerous Holocaust survivors and Jewish people currently living in Germany and Austria, many of whom lost family members to Nazi terror. While many Jews scarred by the human Holocaust never made the connection to the animal Holocaust, and remained speciesists and carnivores, numerous Jewish activists, artists, and intellectuals did, as their experiences of Nazism and concentration camps gave them a greater empathy for all oppressed life and, logically, led them to vegetarianism. As beautifully stated by Edgar Kupfer- Koberwitz, a prisoner in Dachau (1940-1945), “I eat no animals because I don’t want to live on the suffering and death of other creatures. I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures’ suffering by virtue of my own.”

Through a series of compelling narratives, Patterson discusses the lives and moral epiphanies of many distinguished Jewish people who learned to connect the important dots, including Alex Hershaft, founder and president of the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM); Peter Singer, ethicist and author of Animal Liberation; and Henry Spira, noted animal rights activist. Another notable Jewish figure Patterson describes is Isaac Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Many of the characters in Singer’s short stories and novels are vegetarians as well as proponents of a universal ethics of compassion that extends beyond human society to include animals. Singer denounces the hypocrisy of those who speak against bloodshed while themselves causing it in their daily food choices, and he spoke through his characters in poignant statements such as:

“You cannot be gentle while you’re killing a creature, you cannot be for justice while you take a creature who is weaker than you and slaughter it, and torture it.”

“People should live in such a way that they did not build their happiness on the misfortune of others.”

“The man who eats meat ... upholds with every bite … that might is right.”

Singer draws broad connections between the violence humans inflict on animals and the cruelties they heap upon one another, and criticized the “Might is Right” ideology as a fascist ideology at its core. “The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased,” Singer writes, “exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.” For Singer, “There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin ...There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.” Singer insists that “what the Nazis had done to the Jews, man was doing to the animals.” Most famously, in his short story, “The Letter Writer,” Singer drew an apt analogy between the violence German Nazis used against human victims and the tyranny humans throughout the globe impose on animals: "What do they know -- all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

The ideology of speciesism – or human supremacism -- has buttressed systems of domination over animals for over ten thousand years. In his own astute grasp of the links in the gigantic chain of violence, Dachau survivor Koberwitz wrote, “I believe as long as man torture and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well---and wars will be waged— for killing must be practices and learned on a small scale.” In addition to compelling characters such as Koberwitz, Patterson chronicles the life and thought of Dr. Helmut Kaplan. In a protest outside of a giant pharmaceutical firm in Frankfurt, Kaplan enjoined German citizens to recognize that in addition to the revisionist lie that concentration camps never existed, there is a second lie that death camps no longer exist, that society is civilized and no longer rooted in violence and barbarism. With Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kaplan argues that “Everything the Nazis did to Jews we are today practicing on animals,” and that what is happening to them “is exactly analogous to the Holocaust of the Nazis.” Just like the Holocaust, people do not want to know what is happening to animals and are in denial; the “good Germans” who went about their business while the smoke of cremated humans drifted through the air has its analogue in the “good humans” who feign moral goodness and compassion, but ultimately are prejudiced hypocrites whose food choices perpetuate the ongoing Holocaust against animals.

The “Holocaust on Your Plate” Controversy

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals." Theodor Adorno

"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." Tolstoy

Aware of the deep continuities between the animal and human holocaust, and inspired by Patterson’s book and the words of some progressive Jewish scholars, in February 2002, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched a new exhibit which was to travel to over 100 American and foreign cities. The “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit consisted of "eight 60-square-foot panels that juxtaposed photos of suffering and death in factory farms and slaughterhouses alongside parallel images of scenes of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps." Employing its usual method shock tactics to disrupt complacency and provoke thought, PETA hoped that the exhibit would "stimulate contemplation of how the victimization of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others characterized as 'life unworthy of life' during the Holocaust parallels the way that modern society abuses and justifies the slaughter of animals." According to PETA, the photos “graphically depicts the point that Singer made when he wrote, `In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis.’” Newkirk explained the rationale behind the exhibit in this way: “The `Holocaust on Your Plate’ Campaign was designed to desensitize [people] to different forms of systematic degradation and exploitation, and [to show that] the logic and methods employed in factory farms and slaughterhouses are analogous to those used in concentration camps. We understand both systems to be based on a moral equation indicating that `might makes right’ and premised on a concept of other cultures or other species as deficient and thus disposable. Each has it own unique mechanisms and purposes, but both result in immeasurable, unnecessary suffering for those who are innocent and unable to defend themselves.”

The controversial exhibit offended many Jewish and non-Jewish people with its graphic equation of factory farms and concentration camps. Chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, said that the exhibition, was "outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights ... The effort by Peta to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent." Similarly, Stuart Bender, legal counsel for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote an angry missive to PETA asking them to "cease and desist this reprehensible misuse of Holocaust materials."

Yet Patterson shows that it is by no means inappropriate to draw analogies between animal and human slavery or between the animal and human holocaust and that visceral reactions to such comparisons, while understandable on many levels, is morally myopic, exhibits the same type and structure of hierarchy and devaluation Nazis used against Jews, and failed to understand the larger meanings of the human Holocaust.

First, Patterson provides a powerful argument that the human holocaust built on the animal holocaust in significant ways, both ideologically and technologically, and thus there are important and relevant analogies to be made. In both cases, groups of beings are branded as inferior, separated from their families and homes, shipped and processed in rationalized bureaucratic ways, reduced to slave labor and often to experimental subjects of “science,” and ultimately murdered and disposed when their existence was no longer useful or convenient. There is a significant parallel between animals and humans confined in cages or cells, sick and scrawny, crammed into trucks or railcars on the way to slaughter, forced to labor unto death, and killed in gas chamber rooms (or meeting worse fates in the case of animals, such as being sliced apart while still conscious).

Second, as demonstrated throughout the third section of Patterson’s book, many Jewish people and Nazi victims themselves urge the importance of grasping the relationship between the animal and human holocaust, in both thought and practice, so why is it necessarily insensitive or anti- Semitic if non-Jewish people do the same. Here it is important to note that the PETA exhibit was inspired by Jewish writer, Charles Patterson; that it relied extensively on quotes by Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors; that it was funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist; and that it was put together by Matt Prescott, a PETA activist who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. The point of the exhibit was not to ignore obvious differences between the animals and humans, as well as between their respective holocausts, but rather to underscore the profound similarities. Here, in reference to the shared nature of oppressed animals and humans, the bottom line is that pain is pain and suffering is suffering, that all species live in psychological and physical torment stripped from their environment and families, when isolated and confined in small cages, when forced to labor until exhaustion or death, when experimented on, when living in fear and anxiety before finally being murdered.

This said, it is nonetheless crucial to understand the concerns of oppressed human groups when being compared to animals, not only because they often feel their experience is being exploited for the purposes of another group, however sincere or valid (and most critics did not feel the intentions of PETA were honorable or respectful), but also because a key cause of their oppression was being likened to animals in the first place. But the comparisons done by PETA, Patterson, and a host of Jewish writers and activists are hardly the same as those made by racists, anti-Semites, and Nazis, as PETA (as true of animal rights people in general) is not ideologically reactionary but rather wants to overcome all forms of hierarchy, domination, exploitation, bias, prejudice, and violence to develop a more, not less, comprehensive ethic and principle of equality (as based on sentience, not arbitrary, circular, and self-serving human appeals to human reason).

Moreover, the point of the exhibit – as true of Patterson’s book – is not to reduce humans to animals, but rather to raise animals up into humans in the sense that they are accorded respect, granted their proper intrinsic value, and endowed with the rights relevant for them to lead lives based on freedom from pain and suffering and freedom to happiness and pleasure. Finally, whether critics acknowledge it or not, there simply are commonalities among modes of oppression, they do co-constitute and reinforce one another, and these need to be analyzed as one holistic complex of hierarchy, domination, and oppression, one that, as argued all along, has important roots in the domination of animals. As Matt Prescott eloquently explains: "The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible - that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior' - is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. ... The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We're asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms."

To give Dr. Martin Luther King a significantly broader reading that extends beyond the narrow limits of the human community to include all sentience life: “No one can be free until all are free.” There is a moral hypocrisy and speciesist double-standard informing heated attacks on PETA’s attempts to draw parallels between animal and human suffering, one that desperately needs to be transcended in favor of a broader ethic. For while groups such as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League ask PETA to be sensitive to human oppression, understanding that Blacks and Jews often accused PETA of barging into communities with their display and not appreciating how oppressed peoples might feel used or exploited to make moral arguments on behalf of animals. While these criticisms no doubt were valid in many cases, it must also be said that there were few attempts by oppressed people to make the effort from their side to try to sympathize with and understand animal oppression. While PETA may use images of Jewish and Black exploitation in ways they object to, it is more to the point to note that they eat animals in their private lives and groups functions, a considerable more grievous offense than a well-intended, possible misappropriation of images of suffering to expand the moral community. Indeed, the NAACP’s shameless public defense of serial dog torturer and killer Michael Vick was despicable and displayed a grotesque lack of moral sympathy to non-human animals, not fundamentally different from the detachment (if not pleasure) white racists showed toward those Blacks victimized by their violence.

Too many people with pretences to ethics, compassion, decency, justice, love, and other stellar values of humanity at its finest resist the profound analogies between animal and human slavery and animal and human holocausts, in order to devalue or trivialize animal suffering and avoid the responsibility of the weighty moral issues confronting them. The moral myopia of humanism is blatantly evident when people who have been victimized by violence and oppression decry the fact that they “were treated like animals” – as if it is acceptable to brutalize animal, but not humans.

If there is a salient disanalogy or discontinuity between the tyrannical pogroms launched against animals and humans, it lies not in the fallacious assumption that animals do not suffer physical and mental pain similar to humans, but rather that animals suffer more than humans, both quantitatively (the intensity of their torture, such as they endure in fur farms, factory farms, and experimental laboratories) and qualitatively (the number of those who suffer and die). And while few oppressed human groups lack moral backing, sometimes on an international scale, one finds not mass solidarity with animals but rather mass consumption of them. As another Nobel Prize writer in Literature, South African novelist writer J. M. Coetzee, forcefully stated: “Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”

Every year, throughout the world, over 45 billion farmed animals currently are killed for food consumption. This staggering number is nearly eight times the present human population. In the US alone, over 10 billion animals are killed each year for food consumption – 27 million each day, nearly 19,000 per minute. Of the 10 billion land animals killed each year in the US, over 9 billion are chickens; every day in the US, 23 million chickens are killed for human consumption, 269 per second. In addition to the billions of land animals consumed, humans also kill and consume 85 billion marine animals (17 billion in the US). Billions more animals die in the name of science, entertainment, sport, or fashion (i.e., the leather, fur, and wool industries), or on highways as victims of cars and trucks. Moreover, ever more animal species vanish from the earth as we enter the sixth great extinction crisis in the planet’s history, this one caused by human not natural events, the last one occurring 65 million years ago with the demise of the dinosaurs and 90% of all species on the planet.

It is thus appropriate to recall the saying by English clergyman and writer, William Ralph Inge, to the effect that: "We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

Commonalities of Oppression

“Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to humankind.” Albert Schweitzer

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons.  They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.” Alice Walker

The construction of industrial stockyards, the total objectification of nonhuman animals, and the mechanized murder of innocent beings should have sounded a loud warning to humanity that such a process might one day be applied to them, as it was in Nazi Germany. If humans had not exploited animals, moreover, they might not have exploited humans, or, at the very least, they would not have had handy conceptual models and technologies for enforcing domination over others. “A better understanding of these connections,” Patterson states, “should help make our planet a more humane and livable place for all of us – people and animals alike, A new awareness is essential for the survival of our endangered planet.”

The most important objective of the book, indeed, is to promote a new ethics and mode of perception. Eternal Treblinka affects a radical shift in the way we understand oppression, domination, power, and hierarchy. It is both an effect of these changes, and, hopefully, a catalyst to deepen political resistance to corporate domination and hierarchy in all forms. Given its broad framing that highlights the crucial importance of human domination over animals for slavery, racism, colonialism, and anti- Semitism, Eternal Treblinka could and should revolutionize fields such as Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African American studies. But this can happen only if, to be blunt, humanists, “radicals,” and “progressives” in academia and society in general remove their speciesist blinders in order to grasp the enormity of animal suffering, its monumental moral wrong in needless and unjustifiable exploitation of animals, and the larger structural matrix in which human-over-human domination and human-over-animal domination emerge from the same prejudiced, power- oriented, and pathological violent mindset. Political resistance in western nations, above all, will advance a quantum leap when enough people recognize that the movements for human liberation, animal liberation, and earth liberation are so deeply interconnected that no one objective is possible without the realization of the others.

A truly revolutionary social theory and movement seeks to emancipate members of one species from oppression, but rather all species and the earth itself from the grip of human domination and colonization. A future “revolutionary movement” worthy of the name will grasp the ancient roots of hierarchy, such as took shape with the emergence of agricultural societies, and incorporate a new ethics of nature that overcomes instrumentalism and hierarchies of all forms. Humanism is a form of prejudice, bias, bigotry, and destructive supremacism; it is a stale, antiquated, immature, and dysfunction dogma; it is a form of fundamentalism, derived from the Church of “Reason” and, in comparison with the vast living web of life still humming and interacting, however tattered and damaged, it is, writ large, a tribal morality – in which killing a member of your own “tribe” is wrong but any barbarity unleashed on another tribe is acceptable if not laudable. Ultimately, humanism is pseudo-universalism, a Kantian quackery, a hypocritical pretense to ethics, a dysfunctional human identity and cosmological map helping to drive us ever-deeper into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

The profound value of Patterson’s book is to raise the animal standpoint – analytically and ethically – and to show in clear and decisive ways its pivotal importance to the entire spectrum of human interests and politics. Yet while I endorse and share Patterson’s attempt to root hierarchy in the domination of humans over animals, and his goal to clarify the immense consequences of animal exploitation for human existence itself, I want to raise two critical points. First, Patterson’s attempt to root all forms of oppression in one primal source betrays an essentialist theory and metaphysical longing for clear origins and unambiguous beginnings. While there is no doubt that the domination of animals is fundamental to the domination of humans, as his book brilliantly and convincingly shows, perhaps the mythical “first” hierarchy came out of a more complex social matrix within which other proto- or early forms of hierarchy were stirring, coalescing, and taking shape. It could be the case, for instance, that speciesism and patriarchy emerged together and were coeval, or that an even more complex and varied system of power arose whose details remain shrouded in the mists of prehistoric time. Second, Patterson’s linkages between the oppression of animals and the oppression of humans often are too simplistic and unmediated, such that he ignores the forceful overdetermination of many forms of hierarchy. There is, for example. an important connection between speciesism and colonialism which Patterson draws out, but there are other conditioning factors responsible for bringing about and sustaining colonialism, such as stem from the fundamental logic of capitalism, which he fails to engage. Similarly, while Patterson brilliantly explores the relation between slaughterhouses and Nazi death camps, he fails to provide a more complex and multidimensional analysis that would ground the origins of Nazism in the rise of modernism, its hostile anti-modernism, and its opportunistic pursuit of the very capitalist values it condemned (while all the time being propped up in one way or another by numerous US corporations). When Patterson claims that “it was but one step from the industrialized killing of American slaughterhouses to Nazi Germany’s assembly-line mass murder” one detects a linear and simplistic logic.

With such theoretical deficits, one wonders what political shortcomings follow as a consequence. In fact, Patterson paints himself in an idealist and subjectivist dead-end, as evident in his barely one-page asocial “Afterword” that looks to “end to our cruel and violent way of life” without any mention of its current institutional underpinnings. Similar to the subjectivist biases of many deep ecology approaches, Patterson seeks psychological changes, not socio-institutional changes, but the former can lead to nothing but vegetarian pot-lucks, animal prayer services, and a lifestyle advocacy that is completely coopted by capitalist consumerism and markets. Patterson’s inattention to political economy and capitalism is symptomatic of the mainstream animal advocacy movement as a whole, whereby the predominant political approach is single-issue and focused on winning reforms through legislative changes in the state.

Given that Patterson’s theory suggests that human liberation is inseparable from animal liberation, it is unfortunate he did not theorize these relations beyond the moral-psychological level. While animal liberation is a necessary condition for the realization of other liberation movements, it is not a sufficient condition. Whereas the animal advocacy movement tends to be single-issue in its mindset and tactics, it is important to frame the struggle for animal liberation as part of the global struggle against capitalism -- for today animal slavery is driven by capitalist growth and profit imperatives which themselves must be eliminated – which no “new awareness” alone can accomplish without tactics, politics, social movements, and alliance politics. Although speciesism (as well as racism and sexism) obviously predates capitalism and has far deeper roots than modernity, the state, and class systems as a whole, capitalism reinforces speciesism (as well as racism and sexism) in numerous ways. These range from capitalist commodification, profit, and growth imperatives to its mechanistic-instrumental worldview and the system of private property that extends from land and animals to DNA itself (in the current regime of biopiracy and the postmodern gene rush to create and patent new forms of life). Animal liberation can never be fully realized within a global capitalist system spiraling out of control, and thus must be part and parcel of a larger struggle against class domination and hierarchies of all kinds.

The crisis in the natural world reflects a crisis in the social world, whereby corporate elites and their servants in government have centralized power, monopolized wealth, destroyed democratic institutions, and unleashed a brutal and violent war against dissent. Corporate destruction of nature is enabled by asymmetrical and hierarchical social relations, whereby capitalist powers commandeer the political, legal, and military system to perpetuate and defend their exploitation of the social and natural worlds. To the extent that the animal and earth exploitation problems stem from or relate to social problems, they thereby require social and politics solutions that bring out deep structural transformation and radical democratization processes. One cannot change destructive policies without changing the institutions and power systems that cause, benefit from, and sustain them. An effective struggle for animal liberation, then, means tackling issues such as poverty, class, political corruption, and ultimately the inequalities created by transnational corporations and globalization.

Still, to spin the dialectical wheel back again, social change cannot take the first step in the right direction without a “new awareness” of how human liberation is impossible without animal liberation, without recognition that enlightenment, democracy, and moral progress are impossible without dismantling speciesism in favor of a truly non-violent, egalitarian, and inclusive community.