Photo credit: Mickey Z.
Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
March 21, 2014
Holocaust (noun): destruction or slaughter on a mass scale
One of the least discussed obstacles we face in the struggle against speciesism is language.
While most of us will flippantly toss off callous phrases like “more than one way to skin a cat” or “kill two birds with one stone,” perhaps the biggest issue is the way some words -- “rape” and “slavery,” for example -- are often reserved solely for human references.
In an even tighter example of restriction, the term “holocaust” has become uniquely associated with and thus limited to humans of Jewish ethnicity or heritage.
While the scores of communists, Roma, homosexuals, and dissidents murdered in Nazi concentration camps would obviously not concur with such a qualification, what are we to say of the ubiquitous packed trains, warehousing, experimentation, gassing, and targeted slaughter of non-human earthlings?
It’s been estimated that in all the wars and genocides in recorded history, a total of 619 million humans have been killed by humans. That same number -- 619 million non-humans -- are murdered every five days for “food” by an industry that consumes and destroys one-third of the planet’s land surface and is the No. 1 source of human-created greenhouse gases (read: climate change).
Each and every day, somewhere between 150 and 200 animal and plant species go extinct thanks to human behavior and roughly 32 trillion insects are killed each year by automobiles in the United States alone!
Is this not a holocaust, as in “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale”?
How would it disrespect the nightmarish experiences of humans to use the same word to describe practices that are threatening all life on the planet?
"Auschwitz,” wrote sociologist Theodor Adorno, “begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."
To declare otherwise is to betray one’s speciesist bias and expose a glaring lack of holistic compassion.
FYI: To declare otherwise is to also to betray the original meaning of the word: “A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire. The word derives from the Ancient Greek holocaustos.”
So how about we eschew the fascism of speciesist semantics and focus more on the fact that non-humans are being killed by the trillions? This frighteningly and sad reality is not the result of some unstoppable force of nature or preordained theology. Non-humans are being wiped out thanks to specific and identifiable human decisions.
From the film, Earthlings: “Like us, (animals) are the psychological centers of a life that is uniquely their own. What these animals are due from us, how we morally ought to treat them, are questions whose answer begins with the recognition of our psychological kinship with them.”
These animals are also due some linguistic honesty.
#shifthappens
Note: To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person at Hunter College on March 26.
Order Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism here.
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Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on a couple of obscure websites called Facebook and Twitter. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here
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