The Camp and the Farm: On Using the Holocaust

In May 2020 the Netherlands will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its liberation from Nazi terror. Yet, as this is commemorated, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) and Anonymous for the Voiceless NL, the Dutch branches of global animal rights groups, are posting on social media images comparing the conditions suffered by European Jews during the Holocaust with the current living situation of farm animals. In fact, over the last 20 years, multiple marketing campaigns led by global animal rights organisations featured such chilling comparisons and often sparked waves of criticism. Reminding ourselves, and especially those among us who are vegan, why the slaughter of 6 million Jews isn’t comparable to the daily slaughter and violation of animals is primordial, especially in this time of remembrance.

Astonishingly, the link between animal rights and the Holocaust was first made by Holocaust survivors who, after their horrific experience, came out with an extraordinary sense of empathy for all living-beings. Images of the captivity and slaughter of animals triggered dreadful memories for the survivors’ own living conditions in Nazi camps and ghettos. In turn, a few, like Alex Hershaft, the founder of Farm Animal Rights Movement, became fervent defenders of the ethical treatment of animals and started promoting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. However, the fact that a few Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have done it does not necessarily justify such a comparison. Still, for the sake of the argument and to thoroughly debunk such justifications often used by Animal Rights groups, let’s see how far the comparison goes.

Most accounts drawing a parallel between Nazi camps and the lives of industrial farm animals take a very formal perspective on the matter. They make point-by-point technical comparisons about the workings of both systems. While it is true that formally speaking, the brutalisation and commodification of living bodies during the Holocaust bear gruesome similarities with today’s industrial food system, they do not at all compare. Abstaining from comparing the two for the sake of promoting animal rights does not deny their respective suffering; on the contrary, it actually acknowledges it.

Reducing the Holocaust to the workings of extermination camps is disturbingly simplifying. Extermination camps were the results of a state-sponsored biological racism and came after centuries of massacres and pogroms against the Jewish population. German and European Jews were gradually stripped of their rights as the fragile post-WWI democracies failed to protect them. Once the Nazis came to power in Germany, they perverted the state into an anti-Semitic extermination machine. None of this can be applied to the contemporary treatment of farm animals. We need to remember the specificities of a historical trajectory whereby the European tradition of anti-Semitism developed into genocidal racism in order to learn from history and prevent what was arguably one of the cruellest chapters of human history from ever happening again.

Hence, it is important to distinguish between anti-Semitism and specism. Specism, i.e., the ideology that animal rights activists are trying to debunk, is different from anti-Seminitism in that it does not per se entail hate. Indeed, it includes treating other beings as biologically inferior due to their belonging to a “lower” species. Yet, it also involves upholding double standards varying in time, place and species involved. In this sense, a specist society is not driven by ideological hatred against animals; the domination and violation is of a different order. There is no hate. On the contrary, most people don’t find any contradiction in eating bacon in the morning and going to the petting zoo in the afternoon. This is exactly why a main part of the work carried out by animal rights groups involves the reconnection of our values to our actions thereby rebalancing the deep-rooted cognitive dissonance promoted by the current system.

In general, using the Holocaust as comparison always runs the risk of trivializing an unprecedented crime against humanity. It also clearly serves an agenda. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imply that at least some of those campaigns were precisely designed to spark public outrage and amplify their media coverage through sensationalism. Isn’t there another way to translate the daily suffering, abuse and slaughter of billions of animals? It seems that by comparing the Holocaust to the abuse perpetrated on farm animals, animal rights groups have sought to struggle against one kind of oppression by capitalizing on the suffering of another.  Doing this weakens what is otherwise a very powerful argument.