Anti-speciesist Rhetoric

Abstract

The various laws protecting animals that were established in Nazi Germany (but for the most part were never put into effect) had, among others, the aim of marking the taxonomic and ontological distance between pure animals and impure subhumans (Jews, homosexuals, the Roma). The attention to and respect for the alpha predator and noble animals was a vertiginous ignoratio elenchi of the concentration camps. With analogous fallacy, today’s antihuman and anti-speciesist eco-fascism, which regularly makes use of the reductio ad Hitlerum (“meat-eaters = Nazis”), avails itself in an irrational and populist way of the rudimentary argumentum ad personam typical of xenophobic and racist propaganda. An extreme case is a well-known PETA campaign against eating meat.