A Tale of Two Holocausts,
by Karen Davis, Center on Animal Liberation Affairs, Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume II, Issue 2,
"An understandable resentment can come from the sense that the uniqueness of one’s own group’s experience with suffering is appropriated to fit the experience of another group. One group’s experience with suffering is unique, but not in such a way that it precludes comparisons or analogies with the suffering of other groups. For this reason, an experience of oppression, such as the Holocaust, may serve as an appropriate metaphor to reveal similarities inherent in other forms of oppression, such as the oppression of nonhuman animals by human beings ... That there could be a link between the Third Reich and society’s treatment of nonhuman animals is hard for most people to grasp. That nonhuman animals could suffer as horribly as humans in being reduced to industrialized products and industrial waste and treated with complete contempt– a clear link between Nazism and factory farming – contradicts thousands of years of teachings that humans are superior to animals in all respects. Not only is this a “humans versus animals” issue in the minds of most, but by this time the Holocaust has become iconic and “historical,” whereas the human manufacture of animal suffering is so “normal” and pervasive that many people find it hard even to regard the slaughter of animals as a form of violence. Yet the continuity is there. In this article I argue that comparing our systemic abuse of nonhuman animals to the Holocaust can enable us to gain some concrete knowledge about the destructive elements in human nature and what it means to be at the mercy of these elements.  And I ask whether we have the ability – the will – to transform ourselves since we claim to hate violence and to value life ...the appropriation of animal suffering to express human suffering is seldom accorded the justice of reciprocity. On the contrary, at the time of this writing, many Jewish people have expressed indignation over comparisons that are being made by animal advocates between the human-imposed suffering endured by billions of nonhuman animals each year and the suffering endured by millions of Jews under the Nazis. At the same time, many Jews support the comparisons and were sensitized to animal slaughter after experiencing or conceptualizing the massacre of Jews, as Charles Patterson demonstrates throughout his book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (2002). My own stance on the issue appeared in a 1999 profile of my work in The Washington Post. In “For the Birds,” Washington Post writer Tamara Jones declared at the outset: “Yes,