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Title: Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson ISBN: 1-930051-99-9 Publisher: Lantern Books Pub. Date: February, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.84 (19 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A book that could really make a difference in the world
Comment: Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust is an extensively documented book in which Charles Patterson looks at the similarities between our species' treatment of nonhuman animals and the Nazi holocaust.
Patterson shows how humans, by thinking of themselves as superior to the other species, distance themselves from other animals resulting in the exploitation of nonhuman animals, who are domesticated, enslaved and used for various purposes.
Humans have looked upon (and still look upon) nonhuman animals as inferior beings that don't possess souls, speech, reasoning and therefore feelings or sensation. This view has made it easy for some to cruelly treat, kill and eat them. Patterson describes how slaves were treated similarly to domestic animals.
By designating some people as animals during the Nazi holocaust, humans were able to persecute, exploit and violently deal with their own species. Patterson states that referring to humans as animals "...is always an ominous sign because it sets them up for humiliation, exploitation, and murder," and he cites numerous examples of races referred to as animals during times when they were exploited, treated brutally, killed and even exterminated.
Patterson then turns his attention to large scale violence against both nonhuman and human animals in both the United States and Germany. Some of this violence was due to the American eugenics movement, which, according to Patterson, was in part inspired by the breeding of domesticated, nonhuman animals, and the creation of assembly-line slaughter in America which later "...crossed the Atlantic Ocean and found fertile soil in Nazi Germany."
In 1939 the eugenics movement in Germany included killing mentally challenged people and those with emotional and physical disabilities. Many of the people instrumental in these mass murders came from a background in animal agriculture. According to Patterson, the eugenics movement, sterilization and murders combined with the mass industrialized slaughter of nonhuman animals led to the Nazi "Final Solution."
Patterson points out that the Nazis treated their victims like animals before murdering them.. Dehumanizing the victims made it easier to murder them.
By looking at how humans have treated nonhuman animals and other humans seen as inferior, Patterson effectively illustrates how the Holocaust occurred and how similar atrocities occur every day in slaughterhouses and factory farms.
The final part of the book looks at Jewish and German people whose advocacy on behalf of nonhuman animals was influenced by the Nazi Holocaust. In order to create a kinder, more compassionate world, our species must make peace with the nonhuman animals with whom we share the earth and give them the respect that they deserve.
Every so often a book is written that has the potential to make an incredible difference. Eternal Treblinka is one such book.
--Reviewed by N. Glenn Perrett
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent. Should be widely read.
Comment: When I first learned that Charles Patterson was going to write a book about "our treatment of animals and the Holocaust," I had some misgivings. I was aware that some animal rights advocates had made superficial, misleading comparisons between the treatment of animals on factory farms and the treatment of Jews and others in the Holocaust, and I knew that this had hurt the vegetarian/animal rights cause by giving people an excuse to avoid considering the many negative effects of animal-based diets. However, I was an early endorser of Patterson's project because I felt that we needed new, creative ways to alert people to the horrors of modern intensive livestock agriculture, and my knowledge of his character, sensitivity, and background convinced me that he would be an ideal person for this project.
My confidence in his ability to sensitively carry out this project was well placed. The book is very well researched (with almost 700 end notes), and it is written with great sensitivity and compassion. Eternal Treblinka does not equate animals and people. Rather, it shows how the frequent vilification of people as rats, vermin, pigs, insects, beasts, monkeys, etc., dehumanizes people and makes it easier to oppress, enslave, and murder them. He documents many examples of this process, relating it to the treatment of slaves, native American Indians, Japanese people during World War II, Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, and other examples.
The book carefully shows how the enslavement ("domestication") of animals became the model and inspiration for all the oppressions that followed. In particular. he documents a trail from slaughterhouse production lines to Henry Ford's assembly lines for the mass production of automobiles to Hitler's methods in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. He also discusses the myth of Hitler's "vegetarianism"--his diet of little or no meat he often followed to reduce his chronic health problems.
Throughout the book, Patterson is sensitive to the views of Holocaust survivors. Lucy Kaplan, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has contributed an eloquent Foreword. An entire chapter profiles animal advocates who are Holocaust survivors, children or grandchildren of survivors, people who lost relatives in the Holocaust, and those who have given thought to the lessons
of the Holocaust. Another chapter, "The Other Side of the Holocaust," discusses German and German-American animal advocates who began their lives in Nazi Germany.
There is also a chapter on the exploitation and slaughter of animals as a major theme in the writings of Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91), many of whose characters were Holocaust survivors. The title of the book comes from a statement by one of Singer1s characters: "...for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."
The connections between the mentality and methods behind the
oppression of animals and the oppression of human beings that are
documented in this important and timely book have great potential to stir Jews (and others) to start to apply Jewish teachings about the proper treatment of animals, and thereby to help shift the world from its present perilous, inhumane path. I hope that Eternal Treblinka will be widely read, that its message will be extensively applied for the benefit of both humans and animals, and that it will help lead to that day when, in the words of Isaiah (11:6), "no one shall hurt nor destroy in all of God's Holy mountain."
Rating: 5
Summary: 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone'
Comment: Reading Charles Patterson's THE ETERNAL TREBLINKA: OUR TREATMENT OF ANILMALS AND THE HOLOCAUST is a shattering experience. If Patterson's postulates are true, and he has carefully researched and documented with copious footnotes the facts he so bravely reveals here, then we as a global society need to take responsibility for the horrors against fellow man we so willingly assign to 'others', never ourselves. The parallel of man's treatment of animals from Genesis to the present and the recurring genocides of humans is stated early on in this wise book: "Not only did the domestication of animals provide the model and inspiration for human slavery and tyrannical government, but it laid the groundwork for western hierarchical thinking and European and American radical theories that called for the conquest and exploitation of 'lower races,' while at the same time vilifying them as animals so as to encourage and justify their subjugation." And later, "Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species, 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, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and so the same to them."
Patterson traces our carnivorous society to the Ice Age when plants were no longer available for food and animals became the source of staving off hunger. From this beginning he traces the gradual herding, forced breeding, selective trashing of the weak and infirm, sterilization techniques, American Indian genocide and slavery practices throughout the world as well as in America, slaughterhouse productions lines (suggesting that Henry Ford who made assembly line production popular and who was one of Hitler's few heroes forged the way for models for the extermination camps of the Nazis) - all steps from the abuse of animals to the extermination of peoples in such a way that we as readers are forced to reflect on what we have always considered as atrocities that shamed other countries and societies are actually rooted in our own history.
Good books make us think. Patterson writes so well that despite his historical didactic approach to this uncomfortable subject, it is difficult to put this book down. Many may not wish to finish reading his tome, but everyone should be made aware of its postulates. In the midst of his documentation of his theory he places an utterly poetic tribute of a chapter to Isaac Bashivus Singer, the Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1978. Singer was a vegetarian and a poet of kindness and Patterson seeks to imbue hope in his readers by emulating Singer's visions.
THE ETERNAL TREBLINKA is an important book and if we are to learn from history to prevent repetition of past sins then this surely stands as one source of instruction. Would that schools could include this as recommended reading for all students - form Junior High to high school to college.
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Title: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully ISBN: 0312261470 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery by Marjorie Spiegel, Alice Walker ISBN: 0962449334 Publisher: Mirror Books/IDEA Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Animal Liberation by Peter Singer ISBN: 0060011572 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 18 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry by Gail A. Eisnitz ISBN: 1573921661 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: December, 1997 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights by Steven M. Wise ISBN: 0738203408 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 30 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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