littlegoythings:

expectedbehavior:

mozarthoe:

marbled-bear:

spockoandjimjim:

If your vegan “activism” involves holocaust comparisons you owe me a $50 Amazon gift card and a 2,000 word essay explaining why you think Jews are comparable to cattle
Goyim reblog (esp. if you’re vegan)

I mean, I consider other beings as equal to my own and deserving of respect, so comparing anyone to an animal isn’t some henous crime to me. People get so pissy about Vegans pointing out the similarities between factory farming and the Holocaust because it’s really, really easy to. Same with slavery. Factory farming, if you replaced animals with humans, would be seen as far worse than the Holocaust. I’d have to do some digging, but I know that actual Holocaust survivors have compared factory farming to their own personal experiences. It’s very hard for a normal good person, such as yourself, to realize they’ve been supporting an institution that commits such atrocities. It’s natural to want to pretend something isn’t happening because acknowledging it would mean you’re not aligned with your morals. I’m not trying to make the Holocaust seem “not as bad” as it was, I’m trying to tie in something relevant to you to hopefully help you realize what you’re really doing to our planet, your body and animals deemed not fit for respect. I’m not accusing meat eaters as to be akin to actually Nazis, I’m comparing them to the ignorant German citizens that where horrified when they discovered what was really going on.

jews are not!!! fucking!!!! comparable to animals!!!!!!! poc are not animals!!!!!

This will probably get lost in the sheer fuckery present in this comment chain, but here goes.

Vegans who are putting forth this argument are claiming that people and cattle should be equally valued. They don’t see a moral disconnect in equating the two groups, and in order to try and convince others of the value of their moral equation, they compare animal agricultural issues to known human events. Human brains are wired to want to compare unknown quantities with known ones. In this case, the vegans’ estimation of the cruelty of agricultural is so egregious that their human minds immediately start forming comparisons to other known egregious things … like the Holocaust.

However, Jewish people were LITERALLY treated like cattle during the Holocaust. They were crammed into cattle railway cars, tagged like cattle, worked like cattle, treated in all ways as less than human and likened to a “vermin”. If you start to break it down, they were actually valued even LESS than cattle would have been – since cattle could have fed a family or made them money from labor or sale, thus lending survival or commercial value to their existence, while Jews were considered utterly disposable and without any redeeming commercial or survival value.

And that is what the vegans using this argument are not understanding – in comparing the current treatment of cattle to the historical treatment of Jews they are revisiting the campaign of dehumanization that the Jews already faced during the Holocaust. The argument does not have the intended effect of raising cattle (and other animals) to human level through transitive and sympathetic properties; instead it lowers a particular group of humans (Jews) to animal level – which is what the Nazis tried to do, what the Holocaust tried to do. Because Jews were actually treated as worth less than cattle in the past, the tactic of comparing cattle suffering to human suffering – specifically using the Holocaust as the comparable experience – fails and should not be used.

Basically, the two groups cannot proceed from a shared common ground when one insists on forming their basic argument from a historical slur towards the other. (And I understand that this comparison was originated by a Holocaust survivor, but that does not make it an effective argument by default.)

So no matter how much you (vegans) push this argument, you won’t succeed in winning the majority of Jewish people (or others) to your cause with it because you are basing your argument on what is effectively a slur. Try something else.

Excellent breakdown.

Just wanted to re-emphasize that there is a long history of bigots and racists comparing minority group members to animals, specifically to dehumanize them. Nazis and antisemites and racists do this regularly, comparing Jews to vermin, and PoC as well.

Your lack of ill intent does not magically, retroactively, make these comparisons not bigoted. It will not and cannot raise animals to people-level – it will only ever do the opposite. It’s baked in. Don’t fucking do it.