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Ha'aretz, English Edition,
Friday, August 23, 2002

Lambs to the Slaughter
by Carol Cook


"Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust" by
Charles
Patterson, Lantern Books, 296 pages, $20

Not too long ago, The International Herald Tribune reported a new
technological breakthrough: Researchers had succeeded in implanting
computer chips into the brains of rats. The reviled rodents could now be
turned into robots capable of carrying out all kinds of tasks for their
human masters - clearing mine fields, for example. The scientists
interviewed for the article were pleased about the possibilities, but I
felt like I was reading the first scene of a horror film script in
which, later on, the technique would be applied to human beings.

With the implications of this development reverberating in my mind, I
sat down to read "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust" by Charles Patterson. The title comes from a short story by
Isaac Bashevis Singer, to whom the book is dedicated and whose work
inspired Patterson to write it. His thesis is summarized in a quotation
from Singer's short story "The Letter Writer": "... in relation to them,
all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Patterson has written a book about man's inhumanity to man and beast,
and the linkage between the two: "Throughout the history of our ascent
to dominance as the master species," he declares, "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, human
beings exploit and slaughter animals; then they treat other people like
animals and do the same to them."

He traces this pattern from the days when humans lived from hunting and
from gathering plants to the domestication of animals about 11,000 years
ago. Then he moves on to the development of human slavery in the ancient
Middle East, Greece and Rome, and in the European colonies in the
Americas - as an extension of exploitation of animals. The meticulously
annotated text is thick with references from respected sources down
through the ages, from the Bible, with its offer of Divine sanction for
human supremacy, to Aristotle's justifications of slavery, to critics
of these concepts from Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin, to Carl Sagan
and Milan Kundera.

Patterson then moves on to show how the vilification of humans by
applying animal names to them set the stage for slavery and genocide:
"Calling people animals is always an ominous sign because it sets them
up for humiliation, exploitation and murder. It is significant, for
example, that in the years leading up to the Armenian genocide, the
Ottoman Turks referred to Armenians as rajah [cattle]." The Japanese
referred to the Chinese as ants and pigs. The Nazis depicted the Jews as
rats, dogs, pigs, vermin. More recently, the Hutus referred to the
Tutsis as insects, he notes.

When the European explorers conquered and colonized the indigenous
peoples of Africa and the Americas, they referred to them as beasts,
brutes, savages or "lower races." By the 1800s, European scientists
were developing racial theories that put white European males at the top
of the pyramid. Below them were women, Indians, Jews, blacks.

Against this background, Patterson proceeds to present his thesis: The
industrialization of animal slaughter in the United States and the
development of American eugenics crossed the Atlantic and inspired both
Nazi racial theories and the industrialization of mass murder - the
Holocaust.

Patterson doesn't claim his concept is original. He quotes from
"Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light," by Judy Chicago, an
artist. When she visited Auschwitz and saw a model of one of the
crematoria, she realized that "they were actually giant processing
plants - except that instead of processing pigs, they processed people
who had been defined as pigs."

Finally, she wrote: "I saw the whole globe symbolized at Auschwitz, and
it was covered with blood: people being manipulated and used; animals
being tortured in useless experiments ... human beings ground down by
inadequate housing and medical care ... the elimination of people of
opposing political views ... the oppression of those who look, feel or
act differently."

Meat-packing and mass murder

Modern methods of mass production were first developed in the U.S.
meat-processing industry. The meat-loving English and Dutch colonists
set up slaughterhouses right away. When the country expanded westward
along with the railroads, Chicago became the center of the meat-packing
industry. By the end of the 19th century, meat-packers like Armour and
Swift had set up conveyer belts to speed up the process, with each
worker performing a specific task in converting the sides of beef or
pork into chops, steaks or salamis. Henry Ford, who visited a Chicago
slaughterhouse as a young man, later applied the method in his auto
factory.

The Nazis did the same: "It was but one step from the industrialized
killing in American slaughterhouses to Nazi Germany's assembly-line mass
murder," writes Patterson.

Ford was deeply implicated in the process, charges Patterson, who writes
that the anti-Semitic campaign launched in Ford's weekly newspaper,
pamphlets and books "helped the Holocaust happen." Hitler was an admirer
of Ford and his book, "The International Jew," which was popular in
Germany.

Another link was the American eugenics movement, which aimed to improve
the human race by "better breeding." The American eugenicists helped
promote the immigration restriction laws of the 1920s, and led to
compulsory sterilization laws for criminals and the mentally ill in
more than half the states by 1930. Denmark passed a similar law in 1929
and Germany followed in 1933, when the Nazis came to power. Then came
the attempts to breed a master race, eliminating the mentally and
physically handicapped, homosexuals, Gypsies and the Jews.

The horrifying similarities between the slaughterhouse and the death
camp are detailed in Chapter Five, "Without the Homage of a Tear." The
"tunnel of death" of the meat-packing plant is compared with the "tube"
that led to the gas chambers of Treblinka. The problems of dealing with
the sick, the weak and the injured in both killing operations are
explored.

An entire chapter of the book is devoted to the life and work of Isaac
Bashevis Singer, who wrote (in his novel "Shosha") "... we do to God's
creatures what the Nazis did to us." Patterson calls Singer "one of the
most powerful pro-animal voices of the 20th century," and reviews many
of the texts that exemplify Singer's profound empathy for animals.
(Singer, who became a vegetarian in 1962, was once asked if he avoided
eating chicken for reasons of health. He replied: "Yes, for the health
of the chicken.")

In one story by Singer, "The Slaughterer," a young, sensitive rabbi,
Yoineh Meir, is obliged to become a slaughterer. He objects, but is
told that he may not be more compassionate than God. Yoineh eventually
goes mad, cursing God as "a Man of War, a God of Vengeance," and takes
his own life. In the story that supplies the book's title and epigraph,
"The Letter Writer," the main character is Herman Gombiner, a Holocaust
survivor living in New York who befriends a mouse in his apartment. When
Herman becomes ill and cannot feed her, he worries, and when he
recovers, fears the mouse, whom he names Huldah, has died. When she
appears, alive and well, he thanks God, crying as he did not when he
learned that his entire family had been slaughtered by the Nazis: "God
in Heaven! Huldah is alive!"

The remainder of the book is devoted to stories of animal activists who
say their advocacy was influenced by the Holocaust, and Germans who
lived through the Nazi period and later turned to animal activism. For
readers interested in exploring the issues further, there is also an
extensive bibliography.

The one thing Patterson does not address, apart from a marginal
reference or two, is ritual slaughter. In view of the ongoing concerns
of animal rights activists about these methods, I think a discussion of
them would have added another dimension to the author's arguments. But
all in all, this is a thorough and thought-provoking book. If the
linkage of animal rights and the Holocaust seems startling at first, it
begins to make perfect sense as one reads on. Some might see this as
trivialization of the Holocaust; it isn't. Instead, the chilling
parallels Patterson exposes seem to offer even more reason to despair of
the human race.

Carol Cook is a member of the Ha'aretz-IHT editorial staff.