February
2006
The
Gestapo of the Human Spirit
By Karen Davis
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Karen Davis. Photo courtesy of
United Poultry Concerns
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Despite opposition by many, I believe that significant
parallels can be drawn between the institutionalized abuse of human
beings and the
institutionalized abuse of nonhuman animals, and that there are lessons
to be learned by viewing each of these evils through the bleak lens
of the other. I believe there are similarities between the mentality
of the Third Reich and the mentality of “food” animal production
and that the terrains of hidden suffering are not occupied by human
victims alone. I am not alone in my thinking.
In his essay “At the Gates of Hell,” in Terrorists or Freedom Fighters:
Reflections on the Liberation of Animals, Maxwell Schnurer explains how his initial
discomfort, as a Jew, with placing the animal rights movement “in the shadow
of the Holocaust” was revised to the point where he would subsequently
write sympathetically about animal liberators and their affinity with Holocaust
resistance fighters. What convinced Schnurer of the validity of comparing the
atrocities was his trip to Krakow, Poland in October 2002, where he visited the
concentration camps and death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. At Birkenau, especially,
an awareness emerged of which he writes:
What I could see at Birkenau were the artifacts of a system of destruction that
was massive in scale. I had never realized the size of the infrastructure that
was needed to control, enslave, and exterminate that many people. There were
hundreds of barracks covering square miles of ground fanning out from my gaze,
with nothing but desolate wind between them. Long views of barracks juxtaposed
against barbed wire were my only guides as I walked across the concentration
camp. At the far end of the camp were the remains of the gas chambers and incinerators.
These gas chambers were far away from the public—with a wide zone of exclusion
around these two death camps, citizens would never be exposed to the horrors
of the camps unless they worked there or were entering to be killed. At this
point I began to think about the geographical position of slaughterhouses in
America. Kept far away from the public view, the institutions of slaughter in
America are equally massive and hidden from sight.
However, sometimes one gets a glimpse of these places. As you drive down Route
13 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland into Virginia, as I frequently do, you pass
two gigantic chicken slaughter plant operations on your right: first the Tyson
processing complex, followed several miles down the road by the Perdue processing
plant. Each of these plants sits discreetly back from the highway with a corporate
front facing the road and a neutral corporate sign posted in the lawn leading
up to the complex. Each is flanked by other buildings and a big, car-filled parking
lot. All day long, trucks carrying thousands of baby chickens, packed visibly
in crates and cages stacked high on the flatbeds, lumber up and down Route 13,
turn into these complexes, drive back out with rickety empty containers, and
return with a fresh heaving load of victims. One morning I stood outside the
Perdue plant along the highway, and happening to look down at my feet I saw,
beaten into the dirt, hundreds of little chicken faces, small decapitated heads
and impressions of previous little faces that must have toppled out of the dump
trucks as the driver turned the corner to bear these waste objects off to a landfill
or rendering plant somewhere.
On a late February afternoon, on impulse, I swerve off Route 13 onto the road
leading into the Tyson complex, pass the turnstile, and sit in my car with the
windows up, gazing at the scene around back. It is an ugly, dirty, desolate sight,
the Gestapo of the human spirit engraved on the landscape. A truckload of chickens
sits alone on the dock next to the building where the people inside will kill
them, and it will not be a humane death. Apart from some scuttling rubbish and
a few seagulls here and there, nothing from where I sit appears to move. The
chickens appear silent and still, and no human beings are visible in this moment
of understanding, for the umpteenth time, the presumption of being a witness
with something to say about another soul’s experience of being in hell.
To conceive of a world such as this, in which indifference to animal suffering
is as normal as apple pie, is to understand something of how the Nazis could
have “happened” in Germany, how, at Birkenau, for example, with similar
impassiveness, people could watch their human victims being gassed to death. “Gestapo
men stood in a position which enabled them to watch in gas masks the death of
the masses of victims,” load the corpses (perhaps not all of them corpses
yet) and take them outside Auschwitz “by means of huge shovels,” bury
the lot, and return for the next batch, as Richard Breitman writes in his book,
Official Secrets.
Like the rise of animal factories out of traditional farming practices in the
20th century, the Nazi Holocaust arose as an unprecedented event, yet also as
one deeply rooted in age-old attitudes and practices of cruelty and abuse. And
just as both events may be seen, in part, as outgrowths of the Depression of
the 1930s—as government responses to the devastated national economies
that prevailed between World War I and World War II, brought on by the governments
themselves—so both may be seen in part as expressions of the Western mania
for mechanization and industrial technology extended into virtually every sphere
of life, from the Chicago stockyards to Ford motor cars to Auschwitz, and beyond.
As the new year begins, I’ve been haunted by images and thoughts of human-inflicted
suffering. I’m bedeviled by the black holes that open up briefly on TV,
of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, executions by lethal injection, live
birds being tied up in plastic bags and buried alive to “save” us
from terror, crime, the flu—conditions that we, through our practices and
policies, have by and large created. At such times, I do not feel comfort and
joy; I do not feel “safe.” As always, I wonder whether there will
ever be peace on earth, and whether as the poet Matthew Arnold pondered, there
really is, beneath our illusions, a joy whose grounds are true. I wonder whether,
as a species, we truly are evolving, or have we, in the words of an old show
tune, “gone about as far as we can go”? Presumably the labor of animal,
earth, and human rights activists will help us find out.
Karen Davis, Ph.D., is the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns,
a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment
of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs:
An Inside
Look at the Modern Poultry Industry and More Than a Meal: The
Turkey in History,
Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Her latest book, The Holocaust and
the Henmaid’s
Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, was published by Lantern Books in 2005.
This article is partly derived from that book.
