Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Animal Rights Entrenches the Logic of Nazism
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Animal Rights Entrenches the Logic of NazismTHEARGUMENT THAT THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT HUMANS FUELED NAZI IDEOLOGY Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 61 Against this concern it can be argued that Darwinism shows that there is nothing special about human beings; we are an accident of nature’s blind processes just like all the other animals and so it is arbitrary for us to put ourselves on a higher plane than the other animals. (This is the negative implication of Darwinism; the positive implication, which seems to me dubious, or at least arbitrary, is that Darwinism establishes our kinship with animals, and we should be kind to our kin.) This may well be true, but it ignores the potential social value of a rhetoric of human specialty—think only of how the Nazis used Darwinian rhetoric to justify a law-of-the-jungle conception of the relations between human groups. And the Nazis, I am about to note, believed passionately in animal rights. What is more, if natural laws is understood naturalistically, not as Christianity or any other religion that asserts a deep and wide gulf between animal and human nature but as the law of the jungle, then as denizens of the jungle we have no greater duties to the other animals than the lion, say, ha to the gazelle. But all that these points show is that there is no normative significance to our having descended from the apes.
Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 62 Rather the contrary, Hitler’s zoophilia, and Nazi environmentalism more generally, were connected with a hostility to “cosmopolitan” intellect, that is, to intellect not rooted in ethnic or other local particularities. The distinction between humans and nonhumans fell away. The Nazis were constantly blurring the line between the human and animal kingdom, as when they described Jews as vermin. The other side of this coin was the glorification of animals that had good Nazi virtues, predatory animals like the eagle (the Eagle’s Nest was the name of Hitler’s summer home in the Bavarian Alps), the tiger and the panther (both of which animals gave their names to German tanks). Nietzsche’s “blond beast,” the opposite pole of degenerate modern man, was the lion. These examples show how animal rights thinking can assimilate people to animals as well as assimilating animals to people.
A 1939 compendium of Nazi animal protection statutes proclaimed that “the German people have always had a great love for animals and have always been conscious of our strong ethical obligations toward them.” The Nazi laws insisted on “the right which animals inherently possess to be protected in and of themselves.” These were not mere philosophical postulates; the ordinances closely regulated the permissible treatment of domestic and wild animals and designated a variety of protected species while restricting commercial and scientific use of animals. The official reasoning behind these decrees was remarkably similar to latter-day animal rights arguments. “To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy,” observed Goering in 1933 while announcing a new anti-vivisection law. Animal Rights Entrenches the Logic of NazismANIMAL RIGHTS DISCOURSE IS FASCIST AND RESULTS FROM THE SAME BASIC CORE PRINCIPLES OF PURITY WHICH FUNCTIONALLY ENABLED THE HOLOCAUST Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, “THE AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS”, March 2003, http://www.communalism.org/Archive/5/aar.html While contemporary animal liberation activists would certainly do well to acquaint themselves with this ominous record of past and present collusion by animal advocates with fascists, the point of reviewing these facts is not to suggest a necessary or inevitable connection between animal rights and fascism. But the historical pattern is unmistakable and demands explanation. What helps to account for this consistent intersection of apparently contrary worldviews is a common preoccupation with purity. The presumption that true virtue requires repudiating ostensibly unclean practices such as meat eating furnishes much of the heartfelt vehemence behind animal rights discourse. When disconnected from an articulated critical social perspective and a comprehensive ecological sensibility, this abstentionist version of puritan politics can easily slide into a distorted vision of ethnic, sexual, or ideological purity.
Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, “THE AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS”, March 2003, http://www.communalism.org/Archive/5/aar.html The list of pro-animal predilections on the part of top Nazis is long, but more important are the animal rights policies implemented by the Nazi state and the underlying ideology that justified them. Within a few months of taking power, the Nazis passed animal rights laws that were unprecedented in scale and that explicitly affirmed the moral status of animals independent of any human interest. These decrees stressed the duty to avoid causing pain to animals and established extremely detailed and concrete guidelines for interactions with animals. According to a leading scholar of Nazi animal legislation, “the Animal Protection Law of 1933 was probably the strictest in the world”. (19) A closely related trope is the recurrent insistence within animal rights thinking on a unitary approach to moral questions. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.43 Mb. Share with your friends:
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