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SlaveryRecently, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) got in a firefight with the liberal Jewish establishment because PETA dared compare the extermination of Jews in Europe to humanity's practice of mass farming and then slaughtering animals. The Jewish establishment wants to believe that the "Holocaust" was a singular event in all of history, and not the uprising of a people against the parasitic foreign population they identified with Bolshevism, which systematically Holocausted the best intellectuals and strongest people across Europe wherever it took root; however, this article isn't about the petty victim politics of a group of religious and racial fanatics (Judaism) but about the nature of our treatment of animals. There was an article recently about how McDonald's is considering a new, "more humane" method of killing chickens: they're going to gas them. By itself, this seemed to underscore the provocative but accurate commentary of PETA's statement, in that the mythological gas chambers have been reinvented for use in a "humane" way of dispatching the billions of chickens we gobble every year in tiny styrofoam containers with disposable napkins, forks and condiment packets adding up to a mountain of plastic landfill. However, it's hard to tell whether the article was intended as macabre comedy or not, because it offhandedly tosses out, halfway through:
McDonald's animal welfare council suggested a study of the newer method, said Bob Langert, McDonald's senior director of social responsibility. It would replace a slaughtering process in which chickens are hung by their legs on a moving conveyor line and pulled through an electrified vat of water. - USA Today, 12/30/04
So we're moving on from dragging them through electrocution ponds to new and more humane methods? Much as PETA, like Stormfront or One People's Planet, strike me as people who are fanatical about a single issue because they have no solution for the whole, it's clear they're onto something here. No person of integrity finds that basic method acceptable (interestingly, you'll find few people of integrity eating at fast food restaurants, either). No one with any sense of even aesthetics finds that method anything other than amusing in a hopeless way. When one is staring at a worksheet of costs and safety regulations, it may shine like a beacon of Heaven in contrast to other options, but still - it's crazy, and brutal. The root of it is that we see nature and its animals as material, not as a living, continuing process, and thus something that like ourselves we must keep alive. This is brutal comedy, and it would be actually funny if we didn't see here how modern society breaks down: on one side, people are talking about profit and jobs and how important it is that every person can earn a living, even if by generating mountains of landfill making cheap, disgusting food for morons. On the other, there are some fanatics who believe, correctly, that the way we treat animals is insane, but they offer no solutions, thus fall into a self-parodic cycle of attacking nearly every part of society without offering a solution. (The probable reason: internal dissent over the solution, mostly brought on by the liberal attitudes of members, which hold that it's terrible to force anyone to do anything, even if what you're preventing them from doing is sadistic, destructive, excess waste-producing idiocy.) I think of this in parallel to slavery. Whatever one thinks of black people, which is a separate issue from this site and this column entirely, enslaving them as material for use by industry was clearly a denial of the fact that they, like every other animal on earth (humans are animals, much as we'd like to deny it), originate from the same source in nature, and that nature is a continuous process and not static material. It's one thing to have indentured servants, or domesticated livestock, when they are an integral part of the life of families and communities, but when they are sold as material, with no regard to their role in the process of nature, it becomes destructive to both enslaver and slave. The slave obviously is no longer a participant in nature, and becomes bred dumb and useless. The enslaver, accustomed to thinking not of nature but material, soon begins to treat himself with the same lack of reverence. A similar situation prevails with animals today. Far from the old days, where small farms took care of their animals and raised them well, today they're birthed, grown and slaughtered on assembly lines because the vast horde of stupid humans out there will pay $5.99 for chicken nuggets and guarantee profit to another. The material consideration, profit, is the only one; no one points out to McDonald's that, if you make products for morons, soon you become moronic yourself. No one considers their actions in terms of the whole, but only in the specific artificial world of profit which is wholly dependent on this civilization and, when it fails, will become as useless as tits on a bull. The result is that all of us, as involuntary enslavers, become slaves to the moronic need of people who want fast food, and to the profit-motive that jerks us like marionnettes through a boring and moronic course of life that we would otherwise eschew. But remember - this is "freedom," and freedom is slavery.
January 13, 2005
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