Eternal Treblinka:
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
By Dr. Charles Patterson
$20 from Lantern Books, 2002
1-800-758-3756 * www.lanternbooks.com
ISBN: 1-930051-99-9
Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD
In memory of the Cypress hens in Florida and Georgia, who were caged,
starved, and gassed to death. "This is best for the chickens."--Leroy
Coffman, Florida state veterinarian. March 10, 2002
Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and
thinks: they're only animals. -Theodor Adorno
Parallels between our treatment of nonhuman animals and humans
considered to be less than human is what this harrowing book is
about. To view such parallels as an insult to humankind merely
illustrates its thesis. In her Forward, attorney Lucy Rosen Kaplan
says that Eternal Treblinka should be read by all who are not afraid
to understand that the suffering that humans have so relentlessly
inflicted on animals over the course of our species' history is one
and the same with the suffering we so often inflict on each other.
Eternal Treblinka should also be read by those who shy away from this
thesis.
One of the values of Eternal Treblinka is that it places the Nazi
Holocaust within a larger psychological and historical context. It
isn't only modern capitalist society that commits the atrocities it
depicts, although our society could hardly be topped. As Animal
Liberation Front founder, Ron Lee says in the book, "We have been at
war with the other creatures of this earth ever since the first human
hunter set forth with spear into the primeval forest. . . .
Speciesism is more deeply entrenched within us even than sexism, and
that is deep enough."
Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in Poland that began operating in
1942. The title, Eternal Treblinka, is taken from the meditations of
Herman Gombiner, the main character in the Nobel Prizewinning author
Isaac Bashevis Singer's story, "The Letter Writer." Herman, who lost
his entire family to the Nazis, is thinking about a mouse he
befriended whose death he believes he caused, and his sadness leads
to a larger thought: "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."
Eternal Treblinka presents theories from various thinkers including
Freud, Montaigne, Carl Sagan, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Ehrenreich on
the human penchant for war, violence, and the subjugation of other
forms of existence. It looks at traditional methods of subduing
animals in pastoral cultures, noting that "[c]astration continues to
be the centerpiece of animal husbandry." And like the infamous
20th-century psychologist Harry Harlow, who devised experiments to
induce terror in young monkeys and pathologic aggression in their
mothers, herders around the world separate mother cows from their
young by cruel and painful means: "The Nuer tie a ring with thorns
around the calf's muzzle, which pricks the mother's udder. . . .
Lapps smear excrement on the udders of reindeer does in order to keep
their fawns from sucking them." The Tuareg "pierce the nasal septum
of the calves with a forked stick that makes sucking painful." They
"cut the noses of camel and cattle calves to keep them from sucking
their mothers."
Eternal Treblinka looks at how we use language to vilify nonhuman
animals, who in turn are invoked to justify our vilification of other
human beings. According to Patterson, the "designation of the people
of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as 'beasts,' 'brutes,' and
'savages' raised the level of murderousness" towards them. In the
16th century, the English denounced the Hottentots in Africa as
traveling in "'heardes' like their animals" and seeming to "cackle
like hens or turkeis," which made it right and "necessary" to
torture, kill, and enslave them. The voluminous record of hatred
expressed by the Europeans for the nonEuropeans they encountered in
the 16th through the 19th centuries, America's obsession with brain
size as the measure of intelligence in the 19th and 20th centuries,
the ubiquitous and iniquitous concept of "lower animals"-all this
fits neatly into packages of ideas like that of the American
psychologist and educator Granville Stanley Hall, who declared at the
turn of the 20th century: "We are summoned to rise above morals and
clear the world's stage for the survival of those who are fittest
because strongest." (Lest we think such talk is out of date, several
times in the past 3 months, radio talk show hosts have asked me on
the air why "the survival of the fittest" shouldn't determine how we
treat other creatures; a modern code phrase is "top of the food
chain.")
Readers may be surprised to learn that the author of The Wizard of
Oz, L. Frank Baum, wrote in the late 19th century that "[t]he Whites,
by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are Masters of the
American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements
will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining
Indians." Or that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's
father, a Harvard professor, wrote that Native Americans were the
"red-crayon sketch" of manhood on a canvas "ready for a picture of
manhood a little more like God's own image." Or that the
assembly-line idea came from the Chicago Stockyards so admired by
Henry Ford, who adapted the stockyard principle to the manufacture of
cars. Or that Ford published anti-Semitic tracts that fueled pogroms
against Jewish communities in Russia and inspired Hitler, who kept a
life-sized portrait of Ford in his office and praised Ford in Mein
Kampf.
Eternal Treblinka documents America's support for Nazi (and global)
eugenics-"the science of the improvement of the human race by
breeding," in the words of poultry researcher and human eugenicist
Charles B. Davenport. Foundations like Rockefeller provided extensive
financial support. "Learned" American men, whom Patterson represents
in short fascinating portraits, and from whose writings he quotes
significant excerpts, visited German racial hygiene institutes and
wrote fulsomely about the "clean, virile, genius-bearing [Nordic]
blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of
heredity" sweeping us on to "higher and nobler destinies." In
America, compulsory sterilization and castration were used to punish
criminals, prevent further crime, and conquer imbecility. In the
words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927, the principle that
sustains compulsory vaccination and serving in the armed forces "is
broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."
American and German eugenics is an offshoot of farmed animal science.
Charles B. Davenport, a chicken researcher and member of the American
Breeders' Association, was the director of the Eugenics Record Office
established in 1910 on Long Island; his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin,
was also a chicken breeding experimenter, as was Heinrich Himmler,
head of the SS. Other high-ranking Nazis translated the language and
procedures of farm animal experiments into human improvement and
annihilation programs designed to "eliminate inferior blood," "free
people from the burden of the mentally ill," "lure victims into gas
chambers, kill them on an assembly line, and process their corpses."
Patterson shows how human concentration and killing centers are
virtually identical to farmed animal concentration and killing
centers. Tubes into which cows and pigs are driven single-file to
their deaths are no different from the tubes at Treblinka and
elsewhere that led from the disrobing rooms to the gas chambers, down
which naked people were driven by guards using their fists, whips,
and rifle butts-which is how we treat millions of farmed animals
everyday. The SS called its tube leading to the death center the
"Road to Heaven," but, Patterson asks, how does their mockery differ
from meat industry scientist, Temple Grandin, who calls the tube she
designed for driving cattle to their death the "Stairway to Heaven"?
Some will say that treating creatures badly in order to eat them is a
far cry from treating creatures badly simply because you hate them,
but a key point of Eternal Treblinka is that the psychology of
contempt for "inferior life" links the Nazi mentality to that which
allows us to torture and kill billions of nonhuman animals and human
beings with no more concern for them and their suffering than
Hannibal Lecter and Jame Gumb feel for their victims apart from the
pleasure they derive from the taste of their victims' pain in The
Silence of the Lambs. That book says that the plight of the lambs
screaming in the slaughterhouses--the whole human enterprise of
degradation, cruelty, and murder-"will not end, ever."
Eternal Treblinka reminds us of all those other slaughterhouses that
were running alongside the human ones-the "[a]round-the-clock killing
and butchering" conducted at Treblinka, Auschwitz, in Dresden, and
elsewhere. In their diaries and letters, Nazi officials dwell on
their meals. One writes to his wife: "The sight of the dead-including
women and children-is not very cheering. Once the cold weather sets
in you'll be getting a goose now and again. There are over 200
chattering around here, as well as cows, calves, pigs, hens and
turkeys. We live like princes. Today, Sunday, we had roast goose (1/4
each). This evening we are having pigeon."
It's been said that if most people had direct contact with the
animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet
to support this hope. It isn't just the Nazis who could see birds in
the yard, slaughter them and eat them without a qualm, and in fact
with euphoria. In this respect, the persecuted Jewish communities
were no different from their persecutors. In the chapter entitled
"This Boundless Slaughterhouse," we see the Jewish communities of
Poland through the eyes of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), who
grew up in a Polish village, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi,
before emigrating to America in 1935. In story after story, Singer
describes the slaughtering of animals he witnessed in the village
courtyards. In Warsaw, people brought chickens, ducks, and geese to
be slaughtered. "The butchers began to pluck their feathers even
while those creatures were still alive and wallowing in their own
blood. . . Women push forward each with her fowl to be killed.
Porters load baskets with dead birds and carry them off to the
pluckers. This hell made mockery of all blather about humanism."
Growing up, Singer sought to understand the endless bloodbaths that
others took in stride, and worse. He writes: "I had studied in the
book of Leviticus about the sacrifices the priests used to burn on
the altar: the sheep, the rams, the goats, and the doves whose heads
they wrung off and whose blood they sprung as a sweet savor unto the
Lord. And again and again I asked myself why should God, the Creator
of all men and all creatures, enjoy such horrors?" In New York City,
Singer decided-"A combination of a slaughterhouse, a bordello, and an
insane asylum-that's what the world really is."
In Eternal Treblinka chickens and pigs shriek as they are being
cursed and butchered. Nazis bear their souls in their letters and
diaries. We read the opposing testimony of Holocaust survivors and
their descendants. The artist Sue Coe's descriptions of the
slaughterhouses she visited are excruciating: if people can read her
account and continue to eat animals and drink their babies' milk,
what hope is there? A question that is raised over and over by those
who became vegetarians rather than perpetuate the legacy of butchery
in their own lives, is "How can 'we' do to 'them' what was done to
'us' and not even recognize it?" Because this book shows, in the
words of Albert Kaplan, that so far "we have learned nothing from the
Holocaust."
Christa Blanke, a former Lutheran pastor in Germany and founder of
the organization Animals' Angels, cites a link between how we treat
animals and Nazism. First we strip the animals of their dignity--
"The degradation of the victim always precedes a murder." But, we
want to know, why do humans want to degrade and kill? According to
Blanke, "because cruelty and greed always seem to get the upper
hand." But why? Serial killer Ted Bundy said it wasn't that he had no
feelings of remorse towards his victims but that those feelings were
weak and ephemeral compared to his rapacious emotions and drives.
Naturalist John Muir wrote that the people he knew enjoyed seeing the
passenger pigeons fill the sky, but they liked shooting and eating
them more-"every gun was aimed at them."
Eternal Treblinka thus raises questions, and we long for answers.
Why, in the words of Albert Kaplan, are the majority of Holocaust
survivors "no more concerned about animals' suffering than were the
Germans concerned about Jews' suffering?" Isaac Bashevis Singer says
we pretend animals don't feel in order to justify our cruelty, but
why do we want to be cruel to animals? Is comfort with cruelty,
taking pleasure in cruelty, a trait that we carry from our past as
part of our genetic survival kit? Why, when we have the technology to
duplicate animal products with textured vegetable protein, do people
continue to insist they have to have "meat"? Why do we praise
technology for developing substitutes for cruder practices in other
areas of life while balking at its use to eliminate slaughterhouses,
which technology can do? Has Isaac Bashevis Singer's philosophic
vegetarianism had any effect on modern mainstream Jewish ideas and
lifestyle? And if not, why not? This is not to suggest that the
Jewish community should be expected to rise above the rest of
humankind, but that the Jewish response raises questions about our
species no less than does Nazism.
Eternal Treblinka traces an attitude, the work of a base will, that
the Hitler era epitomized. It is the attitude that we can do whatever
we please, however vicious, if we can get away with it, because "we"
are superior, and "they," whoever they are, are, so to speak, "just
chickens." Isaac Bashevis Singer rejected this attitude and the
behavior that goes with it. The New York Times Book Review wrote of
him when he died, "He shied from chicken soup and became a devoted
vegetarian. From childhood on he had seen that might makes right,
that man is stronger than chicken-man eats chicken, not visa versa.
That bothered him, for there was no evidence that people were more
important than chickens. When he lectured on life and literature
there were often dinners in his honor, and sympathetic hosts served
vegetarian meals. 'So, in a very small way, I do a favor for the
chickens,' Singer said. 'If I will ever get a monument, chickens will
do it for me.'"
Like Singer's collected works, Eternal Treblinka is what Singer
called "a deep protest against the killing and torturing of the
helpless." It says No to blaming God, Nature, and Original Sin for
the atrocities we choose to commit against our fellow creatures,
forcing humans and hens together into gas chambers and calling it a
humane solution. In conclusion, Patterson writes that "the sooner we
put an end to our cruel and violent way of life, the better it will
be for all of us-perpetrators, bystanders, and victims." Who but the
Nazi within us disagrees? If we're going to mass murder someone, let
it be him.
--Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD
United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
PO Box 150
Machipongo, VA 23405-0150
757-678-7875
FAX: 757-678-5070
www.upc-online.org
(UPC Book Review of Eternal Treblinka:Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust)
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