Book Review by Mitch Hall
Originally posted at http://www.ivu.org/books/reviews/eternal-treblinka.html
International Vegetarian Union (IVU)
Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
by Charles Patterson
New York: Lantern Books, 2002, 306 pages
Review by Mitch Hall (04.04.02)
Charles Patterson is an historian who has discerned numerous connections between abusive human practices toward animals and the genocidal evils of the Nazi holocaust. His book is persuasive, well researched, and conceptually bold and brilliant. In parts, it is also disturbing to read because of graphic, although necessary, descriptions of carnage. However, it is ultimately uplifting for two reasons: the author’s intellectual integrity as a scholar willing to espouse unpopular perspectives based on sound empirical evidence and reasoning, and his compassionate purpose to reduce violence against innocent victims, human and non-human.
The book’s eight chapters are meaningfully organized into three parts, the first of which peers back into early history. Chapter one makes use of anthropological data to posit human domination of other animals as the model for subsequent oppressions among humans whether based on ethnicity, race, class, or gender. For example, Patterson shows how, “In slave societies, the same practices used to control animals were used to control slaves--castration, branding, whipping, chaining, ear cropping.” (p. 14) In the second chapter, the author documents how the hatred generated to legitimate slavery, warfare, and genocide has been repeatedly supported through “vilifying others as animals.” (p. 27) The logic is impeccable, and it has been repeatedly used by propagandists for mass murder. If animals can be tortured and slaughtered with impunity, people perceived as “wolves, apes, pigs, rats, vermin,” or worse deserve no mercy.
The second part of the book begins with a chapter that shows how Henry Ford was inspired by the assembly lines of the Chicago slaughterhouses to manufacture automobiles in similar fashion, and how leading Nazis followed Ford’s example and disseminated his anti-Semitic writings. Henry Ford, paragon of American “free enterprise” was, in fact, Adolf Hitler’s idol. The victims of the extermination camps were bureaucratically processed for slaughter according to macabre efficiencies pioneered in the American meat industry. Furthermore, close ties existed between the eugenics movement in the U.S. and the Nazi obsession with building the ersatz Aryan master race. Germany’s forced sterilization of “undesirable” people was modeled on California laws. Nazis looked upon anti-miscegenation laws in southern American states as exemplars upon which to fashion their own. These are just a few of the many disquieting historical links between American and Nazi ruling elites that Patterson documents while building his case for considering animals in factory farms and vivisection laboratories as victims of unconscionable cruelty and morally equivalent to holocaust victims.
The book concludes with inspiring stories of Jewish and German holocaust survivors and descendants who turned the horrors of the past into their own creative commitments as animal rights activists and advocates. They couldn’t stand by silently while non-human animals suffered the same misery as the hapless holocaust victims. The suffering of both was just too palpable for them.
One chapter in this last part celebrates “the compassionate vision of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” (p. 169) to whom the book is dedicated. The title Eternal Treblinka comes from one of Singer’s stories in which he states about animals, “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.” Some of the insights expressed in impassioned fiction by the vegetarian Singer are supported through Patterson’s historical scholarship.
This book takes us on a guided tour through the hell of slaughter- houses and death camps and also gives portraits of people who somehow transcended such barbarity to work for animal liberation. While they are many, they are not the majority of survivors. What helped them derive such humane lessons from such iniquity? Answering that question is beyond the scope of Patterson’s study. He provides a valuable service by witnessing to their courageous lives. However, the question remains important The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin made relevant observations in Man and Society in Calamity (1941)and later studies. He spoke of the law of moral polarization. Accordingly, Freud was not correct that “calamity and frustration uniformly generate aggression.” Nor was Toynbee right that we necessarily “learn by suffering.” Rather, depending on the type of personality, some people who suffer cruel injustices become creative altruists while others become brutalized and destructive. (Sorokin, Pitirim. A Long Journey. New Haven: College and University Press, 1963, p. 287) What makes for the type of personality who becomes compassionate no matter what happens? What beyond the cruel lessons of suffering leads to the kind of activist heroes Patterson celebrates in the last section of his book? This is a subject meriting more research by those who want peace among humans and safety from human predation for non-human animals. Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka is a wonderful contribution to that peace and safety. It deserves to be read and discussed as widely and deeply as possible.