Madison — As such a formative event in the history of humankind, the Holocaust is also prime material for abuse and misuse. One recent example of such abuse recently made its way here.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has created a “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign that seeks to shock the viewer into a renunciation of eating meat.
The fundamental premise of the exhibit, shown Monday near the Capitol building and making its way to other state capitals this week, is that modern techniques of mass meat production are the equivalent of the mechanized and organized mass production of death that stood at the center of the Nazis’ “final solution to the Jewish problem.”
For those engaged in Holocaust study and education, one of the greatest challenges is in conveying a sense of the often frustrating complexity of this history and of the cardinal importance of making clear distinctions. This is one of the key points on which PETA’s campaign fails completely, and the result — notwithstanding the presumably authentic concern with ethics and suffering — is intellectual confusion and a moral failure.
In one of its visual juxtapositions, “The Holocaust on Your Plate” places Jewish inmates in the barracks of the Auschwitz extermination camp alongside present day chicken coops in which the chickens are maintained in cramped quarters in preparation for their eventual slaughter.
Indeed, PETA informs us, it is not coincidental that SS leader Heinrich Himmler was “an aspiring chicken farmer” who translated some of the techniques of this trade into the designs for the murder of Europe’s Jews.
The first problem with this “analysis” is over-simplification of historical context and processes. The “final solution” can hardly be attributed to Himmler alone.
Terrorized yeast
Moreover, this version of history completely ignores such issues as the growth of modern racial anti-Semitism, the profound impact on Nazi thought of scientific racism in general and the history of the eugenics movements, which sought, since the mid-19th century, to “improve” human societies through selective breeding and other, often far more disturbing practices.
But PETA fails not only on the historical front. This same confusion, and the inability — or unwillingness — to make clear distinctions where they must be made clouds their moral vision as well.
Misquoting and misusing historian Richard Breitman, PETA informs the viewer that “Himmler didn’t consider his victims human.… They were like the pests and vermin any farmer had to dispose of if he was going to sustain himself and his family.”
This is fairly accurate: In the Nazi world-view, humanity was divided into distinct races each of which occupied a clear place on a racial hierarchy (headed, of course, by the Aryan master race); but the Jews were off the scale. They were considered akin to a parasite, which penetrates human societies and destroys them from within.
If we consider how one might relate to such a view from the perspective of PETA’s moral stance (and I have no doubt PETA members would find the Nazi scheme abhorrent), we are left with the question: What in fact is wrong with Nazi racism?
After all, PETA’s argument here — and most of us would agree — is that one of the Nazis’ sins was that they treated humans like cattle — or, indeed, worse. But if we take PETA’s moral position, why should this be seen as a moral failing?
They, too, claim that animals and humans share the same moral standing, and our moral obligations to both are precisely the same. While they bemoan the “dehumanization” to which the Nazis subjected their victims, the direct equivalency they establish between (Jewish) human beings and cattle or chickens — while unquestionably stemming from different motivations — bears the same moral result. There is no reason why I should be treated any differently than a chicken. The moral consequences are frightening indeed.
And why stop there? Think of the terror inflicted upon the yeast we use, brutally placed in the freezer for weeks on end, later fattened with sugar and flour in order to grow with an unnatural rapidity, only to end in the fiery inferno of our ovens and devoured in our bread.
It seems I ought not only give up meat, but bread as well. And I have not yet even begun to consider the horrors of yogurt and vegetables.
I do not write this solely for the sake of cynical humor. PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign is a clear example of the moral danger involved in our contemporary insistence on the equivalency of all to all, the failure to think clearly and to use the capacity for rational thought and distinction with which we have been endowed.
One must acknowledge, by the way, that the conditions in which animals are raised for modern mass production of meat and eggs are, in fact, horrific. To say that animals have a different moral standing from human beings is not to deny that we do have moral obligations toward them.
And yes, the realities of modern meat production are extremely disturbing not only because of the manner in which the animals are treated, but due to the health implications that they bear for human beings as well.
But this point can be made powerfully and clearly without delving into the thought-obscuring shouts of “Holocaust! Holocaust!” which have become so popular whenever something happens that somebody does not like.
Madisonian Arieh Bruce Saposnik is historian of modern Jewry who will be joining the faculty of Arizona State University this fall. He worked for five years at Yad Vashem in Israel developing educational programs on the Holocaust.
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