Thank you for the AMA. It's a topic extremely close to my heart, and it's wonderful to see it getting some serious exposure here.

> I noted the many similarities between how the Nazis treated us and how we treat animals, especially those raised for food.

This argument is something that hit me incredibly hard when I first read Patterson's Eternal Treblinka, and provided the final push I needed to make me give up animal products altogether. I'd sincerely recommend it to anyone remotely interested in animal rights.

A Holocaust survivor named Alex Hershaft went on to found FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement) after drawing comparisons between the atrocities of the Holocaust and animal agriculture. There is also Jewish Veg which is a community who generally supports that message.

There is a book called Eternal Treblinka which outlines the views of various Holocaust survivors and their families in relation to animal rights. It turns out there are indeed many outspoken vegan Jews who support this comparison.

Either way, I'm at the point where I think this comparison does more good than harm because people need to truly realize the scale and injustice of animal agriculture. A person's feelings about an argument do not make that argument any less true. Obviously good activism requires tactful messaging, but IMO the sooner people realize we are unjustly murdering trillions of other on a mass scale the better.

I don't like it when people dismiss veganism because it's seen as movement of privileged white people. That's disingenuous. But it's ugly when white privileged people act like the privilege of money - and choice - doesn't exist.

I come from a poor family. My mom now knows how to make a tofu scramble, thanks to me. But I'm from an area that didn't have soy milk in the grocery store, and I thought of it as exotic rich people food. Promoting veganism to people below your own socioeconomic status can be alienating to them when they have no idea how to cook the foods you're introducing to them. It makes veganism seem like something out of their reach and completely daunting. It doesn't seem empowering, it seems shaming.

My mother is also someone who once cooked everything from scratch and who must now often rely on food banks and instant meals. I wouldn't dream of insinuating that she isn't trying hard enough to be vegan. She also lacks the privilege of time - after work, she is too physically and mentally exhausted to prepare real food.

Anyway, I am very sensitive to issues of class. FWIW, I haven't met a single working class vegan in person, and all the people to introduce me to veganism were indeed vegans from some of the wealthiest suburbs in America (the North Shore of Chicago). And for the first few years I was vegan, I felt like animal rights was something I couldn't allow myself to care about when I was so focused real, painful issues of food access back home, where people literally hunt for food or go hungry. I was the first poor person my new college friends had ever met, and they were a bunch of anarcho-syndicalists. They said some insanely ignorant and offensive things without even realizing it, and yet I was exactly the type of hypothetical person they were sticking up for.

I do cringe when the AR movement appropriates slavery as a comparison. I think black vegans should stick to doing that - otherwise you're going to potentially alienate blacks by comparing them to animals. Same goes for the Holocaust. The comparison has been done well - see Eternal Treblinka - but I have also seen it whipped out for shock value. It ends up being tasteless and offensive instead of profound and thought-provoking.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that the face of veganism is undeniably white and rich, so we can't pretend like people are pulling the "white privilege" thing out of nowhere. It is often conflated with expensive health food fads, and there is definitely a connotation of some foods as "trashy" and others as virtuous. Some of the most popular vegan cookbook authors are thin white women. The marketing is toward people who will try "exotic" food (there's another bit of cringeworthy racism amongst vegans - characterizing ethnic foods as "exotic"), and the activists are people who may have lots of time on their hands but are clueless about outreach.

I'm not saying lower class people are too stupid or busy or impossibly poor enough for veganism to be relevant and important to them. But it took me a long time to feel that being vegan was a compelling and empowering lifestyle choice for me, and it's because I had to connect the exploitation of both humans and animals on my own. No rich kid could have channeled that anger from me, and the anger at all fucked up systems of exploitation is how I communicate the importance of animal rights to the working poor people I grew up with. And as well-intentioned as rich kids are, they honest-to-god often don't get it, and I don't expect them to, but they have to quit pretending like their audience should be 100% receptive to them just because of the animals.

Fundamentally, you will believe the comparison to the Holocaust is either valid or not. I do and I'm jewish.

It can still be made tactlessly, i.e. PETA's pictures of dead chickens side by side with Holocaust victims.

The validity is intellectual, not necessarily (although admittedly in part) visceral. As I.B.Singer observed, in his quotes we all know:

> As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

> What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? 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.

In fact I'll throw together some further reading/watching material.

• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450702656&sr=1-1&keywords=eternal+treblinka
  
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18mZrDujOm0
  
  
• http://salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv8-1.html
  (for reference https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.KOBERWITZ)

Not really offensive at all considering members that survived the jewish holocaust made analogies about how they were treated to factory farms, some even went vegetarian. It's only offensive because people really never thought that hard about it and they think humans are "above animals" and should not be equated to animals. <--- forgetting that this mentality that one group is better than another and should not be equated to another group is exactly the mindset that allows for slavery and holocausts. Not to mention Auschwitz was the one that adopted factory farming methods to use on humans because they were so efficient. Everyone surprisingly in my veg group seems to at least acknowledge this.

This should be a mandatory read http://smile.amazon.com/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413044813&sr=8-1&keywords=eternal+treblinka


While not a very pretty site layout, this also explains the comparisons without having to buy anything http://davidsztybel.info/16.html

I wasn't going to write something here, but why not join the fun.

http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999

> Several writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, and animal rights groups have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust.[1]

> Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a pacifist, conscientious objector and Holocaust victim who was sent to Dachau for "being a strong autonomously thinking personality",[9] wrote in his "Dachau Diaries" (kept at the University of Chicago Library[10]) that "I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures' suffering by virtue of my own".[11] He further wrote, "I believe as long as man tortures and kill animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale".[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights_and_the_Holocaust

Eternal Treblinka is a book about some of the parallels between these two subjects.

You may not agree, but Isaac Singer, who fled from Poland when the Nazis invaded and (IIRC) lost family members in concentration camps, said that "in relation to [animals], all people are Nazis."

Designating that a certain group is fit only to serve our needs and then die at our whim, all based on arbitrary determination of what traits make a being "worth" anything... different people will relate that to Nazi ideals in different degrees, but there is a lot of similarity.

>well-fed, medically treated animals

You are also operating under the assumption that the animals are not abused. Read "Slaughterhouse" by Gail Eisnitz and then you'll know a little of the firsthand accounts of how horrible humans can be to animals on a day-to-day basis.

Highly recommend this book if anyone is in two minds as to the importance of animal liberation to humans.

There's an excellent book that takes its title from that quote:



https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999



I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of industrialized slaughter, of both humans and animals.

"In relation to them, all people are Nazis"

Isaac Bashevis Singer

https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999

Always good to hear when people are familiar with Freire! I don't like using such militaristic metaphors, but the grenade reference is (if I remember correctly) a paraphrasing of Guy Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle and instigator of the May '68 student protests in France. Seemed relevant.

I'm actually in the process of ordering books, but I don't know how hopeful they're going to be. I'm just excited to get new books. Gotta find things to get excited about. The first is Green is the New Red about the construction of 'ecoterrorism' and the second is Eternal Treblinka, which looks at the emergence of industrial scale killing of humans and animals. Pretty uplifting stuff haha.

http://www.adaptt.org/killcounter.html might perhaps be of interest to you.

Eternal Treblinka is indeed an excellent book every Vegan (and non-Vegan!) should read.

• Eternal Treblinka
  
  
• Bleating Hearts
  
  
• Eat Like You Care
  
  
• Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows
  

I wrote my thesis on this. Here are a few of my sources and some new works:

The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery

Eternal Treblinka

The Sexual Politics of Meat

Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters

Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

How about Eternal Treblinka?

> I think the suggestion that raped women and slaughtered pigs co-occupy any kind of group is idiotic.

I personally know raped women (more than one!) who have compared their experience to what animals experience. I also know of holocaust survivors who have compared their experience with that of farmed animals (Alex Hershaft is a contemporary example).

You can argue that other animals' suffering isn't comparable, isn't worth as much as human suffering, because "they're only animals." But look at history: "They're only Blacks." "They're only Jews." "They're only women. Come on now, let's not blow things out of proportion..."

Slavery was justified on the assumption that slaves inherently had less value, and therefore their suffering wasn't comparable to ours. And rights for children and disabled people were downright mocked until 30 years ago ("rights for retards?!"). Gay rights, like animal rights, was also seen as a joke!

The course of human progress has been about overcoming this primitive "might makes right" model, toward a viewpoint that vulnerable groups need protection from exploitation. It's encouraging to me that more people are trying to be on the right side of history in regards to animal rights.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a legend. Another part of this quote is used as the title for a book by Charles Pattinson, called Eternal Treblinka. It's a powerful read and really highlights the parallels between animal testing today and the testing and experimentation the nazi's performed on Jews during the WWII.

Here's a link: http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999

You may be referring to the book Eternal Treblinka, a phrase coined by Isaac Bashevis Singer. And you seem to be ridiculing the concept of speciesism; however, the topic is more complex than described in your story.