And now an article guaranteed to piss just about everyone off.

From our archives—
OpEds: He who says speciesism says fascism—

By Patrice Greanville 

Forty-eight thousand million animals—yes, 48 billion creatures—are estimated to die each year as a result of human activities ranging from factory farming to hunting, the fur garment trades, commercial exploitation of various kinds, and biomedical research. That’s more than 130 million creatures every single day, including birds, cows, and hogs, all of them highly sociable animals. And this mind-boggling figures fail to account for the human toll on marine life, which is usually just counted in [millions of] tons. Such is the reckless, unremitting carnage in the oceans that now vast zones are dying or dead, depleted of its prior life. 

The way we go about killing animals, wherever they may be found or kept, land, sea or air—murdering and torturing are better words—is astonishing. We do it with abandon and we do it in such institutionalized, “tradition” approved ways that only a minority ever realize the extent of the tragedy. Since the era of modern fishing began 200 years ago we have decimated the oceans, ostensibly infinite reservoirs of life, converting many maritime regions into what Farley Mowat accurately decried as “seas of slaughter.” In the USA alone, every year almost 50 million turkeys are killed just for Thanksgiving Day, to commemorate a date that is of questionable historical merit, and which, despite the fact that the sacrificial victims have grown from a handful to tens of millions, rarely stirs any introspection. Sadly, such incidents are but a mere drop in an invisible sea of abuse whose actual roots date back to our earliest times as a species with self-righteous “dominionistic” claims over nature.

Forty-eight billion animals is a stunning figure, yet this figure, regarded by many experts as scandalously conservative, does not include animals mistreated or dead as a result of habitat destruction, widespread pollution, apparently “harmless” recreational activities such as sport fishing and boating, and the collision of animals with “modernity” (up to 250 million animals die annually as roadkill on the American highways alone). We have become indeed not only the most appalling tyranny over every other sentient creature on this planet, including many segments of our own breed, but also a raging, self-righteous cancer extending itself with impunity to every corner of the earth.

Time to do some rethinking

Today, as a result of an amoral industrialism, ecological deterioration and other related issues, self-defined progressives can’t afford to go on pretending that suffering on such egregious scale is just a peripheral issue, or the concern of affluent diettantes with little interest in other social issues.

Due to a deeply embedded and largely unexamined 18th Century heritage of philosophical “superhumanism” (“man is the measure of all things,” the still largely unchallenged weight of religious dominionism, and the rest of all that self-celebratory rubbish which, we should mention in passing, arose out of superstition and as a response to a greater form of human stupidity, the one granting God and King total control over human agency), the Left continues to endorse or acquiesce in human supremacist attitudes toward animals. This moral blindness is inexcusable for those who rightly see themselves as the moral vanguard of humanity. [Check this article, for example: Rethinking Revolution: Animal Liberation, Human Liberation, and the Future of the Left by Steven Best . It’ll probably challenge many of your assumptions.]

The bottom line is that speciesism—an underhanded and primitive form of fascism applied to animals and nature in general—is by far the oldest and most pervasive form of brutal tyrannization known on our planet. I don’t use the word “fascism” as hyperbole in this context or for dramatic effect. I wish it were hyperbole. But the fact is that fascism is distinguished for its unilateral proclamations of superiority by a certain race or breed, with such spurious superiority endowing said race with the “right” to dominate, exploit, and annihilate at will any group deemed “inferior.” If that pretty much doesn’t describe eloquently our despicable behavior toward non-human animals, I don’t know what does.

I realize quite well that to raise this topic is to ask for trouble. The fight to expand the realm of moral consideration to animals—to make such inclusion a matter of right—arouses deep animosities, including in the midst of many people who would otherwise define themselves as card-carrying progressives or, as our opponents across the political tracks like to say, “bleeding hearts.”  Well, I guess the bleeding does not suffice in many cases to include other sentient beings—especially those already dismissed by tradition as “raised for food” (as if such categorization in and of itself erased all trace of what is by any reckoning a truly  nightmarish form of tyranization).

I mean no offense to anyone on this blog but I’ve been through this before, and I’ve been both an animal liberationist and a leftist all my life. So I know the score, and what I’m saying here is that I am resigned, I expect to see sarcasm, derision, flippancy, intellectual laziness, and, why not, even intellectual dishonesty—for such is the deep reservoir of human chauvinism that afflicts so many in our species.

The more creative will hide their prejudices by feigning alarm at my conflating the words “fascism” with “speciesism.”  Well, I have something to say to this easily offended crowd: You abuse a language when you turn it on its head, to accomplish precisely the opposite of what the words originally denoted, or in furtherance of what would be, by fair evaluation, an obviously despicable pursuit. Bush and his contemptible camarilla, as we all know, are a prime example of this: in The First Decider’s lips the words freedom, democracy and justice, not to mention a fair shake for the disadvantaged, are but tools of manipulation to buttress the agenda of a deranged and criminal plutocracy driving the world ever closer to total war.  But what am I proposing here? Just think about it for a moment. Something that all of you should be for, an extension of compassion, or at least the benefit of the doubt when subjecting mind-boggling numbers of creatures to the finality of death. In other words, I’m pleading for a reduction in the colossal amount of violence that this planet already sustains, the violence that at least our species is directly responsible for… Where is the inversion of meaning there? The outrageous betrayal of the language? Or is it that by saying “fascism” and “speciesism” in one breath I manage to offend the sensibilities of too many purists who happen to land on this forsaken blog?

Words change, expand, become obsolete, drop and add connotations and meanings, and sometimes die, like the things and realities they were initially created for. And besides, just like there are many varieties of capitalism, socialism and communism, so you also have distinct varieties of fascism. In some, all the bells and whistles are found that connote “classical fascism” —the jackboots, the open corporatization of the state, and so on and so forth, as we have come to know it. In others, it’s more of an all-encompassing worldview, a system of values, an ideology that justifies a malignant treatment code. But here’s the crux of the question, as some might say. The boots, the marches, the endless wars, the nauseating violence, the paraphernalia of fascism and the fascination with death—all of that cannot happen in the absence of an ideology that starts by justifying the oppression of others by virtue of a self-serving, unilateral declaration of superiority. The concept is the same; the contexts vary.

Regrettably, human chauvinism cuts very deep and pervades every nook and cranny of what we optimistically still call civilization, and has done so for millennia. No one is immune to its infection, including many folks who regard themselves as impeccably “progressive”. Indeed, it is from their ranks that you often hear some of the worst and most derisive epithets. The usual argument is that progressives, always a thin line against barbarism, have better things to attend to than the fate of “mere” chickens and cows. Compassion, to such individuals, has obviously left the building; it is fungible, divisible, and comfortably apportionable according to inclusion or exclusion in certain categories of privileged sentience. They obviously don’t see—refuse to see—the parallels with so many other struggles they may have honored or participated in, nor do they see how the liberation of animals is an integral part of a serious environmentalist agenda. No, here they draw the line, and reason, kindness, and the most elementary fairness fly out the window.

But such narrow-minded and intellectually lazy positions will surely be exposed—sooner rather than later—for the pretentious sham they truly are. For now, in the age of an utterly deranged industrialism, with a global system blatantly proclaiming as its organizing principle the pursuit at any cost of infinite growth in what to any sensible person is a very finite and fragile planet, the tyranny of humans over nature has acquired monstrous proportions. The colossal dimensions of animal exploitation by the amoral industrial method and the death of one species after another grimly attest to that.

In view of these incontestable facts, no one with a scintilla of decency should turn his or her back on such knowledge. It is the duty of all people who haven’t yet done so, and especially of progressives, to re-examine their assumptions about animals, about their everyday conduct in choosing food and clothing and transportation modes, and to join the last struggle against the first tyranny. By doing so, they will re-invigorate the environmental movement, rendering it less abstract and more passionate, because while fighting for nature is a noble and urgent call, fighting for nature’s oppressed creatures is a matter of long overdue justice.

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