the U.S., Harper discusses the controversy surrounding a 2005 PETA campaign entitled “The Animal Liberation Project.” PETA has removed the link to their online version of the exhibit, so I quote Harper’s description of it:
images of human suffering juxtaposed with nonhuman animal suffering: a painting of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears positioned next to a photo of herds of nonhuman animals being led to their demise; the atrocity of a Black man’s lynched and tortured body next to a picture of an animal that had been burned; a black-and-white Jewish Holocaust photo next to animals in confined, crammed structures on a meat-production farm.21
From my observation of individual photos still available online I can add to this that the historical photographs of violence against people are in black and white while the contemporary images of animal abuse are in colour, and the juxtaposed images are emblazoned with words including “Enslaved,” “Hanging” and “Beaten.” These images were exhibited in public places throughout the United States, including on university campuses, where they were often met with protest.22
The PETA campaign is different from the analysis of McJetters. Even if it implies a comparison between systems of oppression, the juxtaposition of violent images can readily be interpreted as a comparison of certain groups of people with animals. In the words of Claire Jean Kim, “Jews, blacks, and others have historically been constructed as liminal figures standing at the boundary between humanness and animalness precisely in order to justify their enslavement or extermination.”23 The PETA exhibit draws on this history, not to raise awareness of the persistent use of the tropes of bestiality in contemporary racist language, but as a publicity stunt to get people to think about the suffering of animals. PETA’s use of sensationalist imagery fails to take into account that these will have different meanings for different groups of people, most notably those whose ancestors are represented in them. While recognising that such representations were aimed at raising viewers’ consciousness, Harper argues that they are oppressive to people of colour because the “images and textual references trigger trauma and deep emotional pain.”24
Harper contrasts the “lack of sociohistorical context” in PETA’s video and photo campaign with what she calls the “sensitive, scholarly explorations” of Marjorie Spiegel and Charles Patterson, who have written books analysing the historical interconnections between the violent instrumentalisation of animals in farming and scientific experimentation and, respectively, slavery and the Holocaust.25 In The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Spiegel takes the reader through a brief account of the different ways chattel slavery was interlinked in the past with the forced keeping of animals, especially those destined for human consumption. She shows that white writers often compared Africans, as well as Indigenous Americans, to other animals (“brutes”), how similar instruments of control (for example, muzzles and chains) were used to restrain slaves and animals, and draws parallels between the forced breeding practices used on human slaves and farm animals. Based on such evidence, Spiegel makes a compelling case for comparing the institution of chattel slavery to industrial farming, and for taking the experiences of those oppressed by these systems as the impetus for change. “It is vital to link oppressions in our minds,” she writes, “to look for the common, shared aspects, and work against them as one. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power.”26 In Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust Patterson makes a similar case that ideologies and practices of white Christian supremacy are historically interconnected to human control and abuse of other animals. Christian vilification of Jews as beasts and vermin went back centuries; National Socialist propaganda drew on and expanded these anti-Semitic metaphors. Patterson also examines the interwoven histories of forced breeding and sterilisation, eugenics and industrial slaughter that were developed and used on different species of animals and on millions of people during the Nazi genocide.27 Eternal Treblinka, like Spiegel’s Dreaded Comparison, draws out these interlocking systems, without insisting they are the same. Nor does either book claim that the histories of slavery or the Holocaust can be explained entirely with reference to similarities with the violent instrumentalisation of animals, or that a myriad of other factors did not contribute to these histories of genocide.
In contrast, all too often comparisons between animal abuse and genocide are made in sensationalist ways that reduce complex historical processes to dramatic images, slogans or simplistic analogies that emphasise similarity over difference. Some such bad comparisons can be found in contemporary defences of veganism. For example, in 2009 the vegan philosopher Gary Steiner published an article in the New York Times in which he made a reference to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Letter Writer” (the story also inspired the title of Patterson’s book). Steiner wrote that Singer “called the slaughter of animals the ‘eternal Treblinka.’”28 Singer did indeed explore the theme of human maltreatment of animals in a number of his short stories, frequently drawing comparisons with the Holocaust.29 However, to use the term “eternal Treblinka” as a shorthand for animal exploitation belittles the complexity of meaning in Singer’s fictional work. The “Letter Writer” is not a political tract; it is a moving tale about a Holocaust survivor and his multiple relationships with the human and other-than-human world, including a mouse who inhabits his house.30 Following some objections by readers to his use of the phrase “eternal Treblinka,” in a chapter entitled “Cosmopolitanism and Veganism” Steiner excused himself, saying he “had absolutely no intention of belittling the hideous fate of the Jews.”31 This strikes me as a defensive reply that demonstrates a lack of willingness to listen and engage, in Harper’s words, with other people’s accounts of the “painful history of racially motivated violence.”32
But Steiner persists — going beyond the use of the comparison between animal slaughter and the Holocaust to make it into a competition:
when we occupy the anthropocentric standpoint, we do something that is arguably much worse: we fail to appreciate the fact that this sacrifice of innocents is so woven into our everyday practices and values that we tend to shudder at the characterisation of this regime as being in any way comparable to large-scale human tragedies.33
Steiner seems to suggest that one history of mass violence — the Holocaust — enjoys greater recognition than the other — mass animal slaughter. The implication is that the anti-Semitism and other forms of racism that enabled the Nazi genocide are now fully recognised and therefore not as urgent as the issue of mass animal slaughter. A similar problem was on display in the PETA campaign “The Animal Liberation Project.” As one critic observed, the juxtaposition of black and white photos of historical violence against African-Americans, Jews and Indigenous people with colour photos of violence against animals created a visual image “implying that ‘hey oppression of minorities is in the past. It’s over!’”34 In both cases, there is a failure to acknowledge and confront the realities of persisting forms of racial discrimination and violence.
In Steiner’s usage, the Treblinka extermination camp is shed of its historical specificity and the realities of the people who perished there. It becomes instead a catchphrase to promote veganism as part of a philosophical argument. There are other examples of vegan and animal rights activists making similarly reductive references to Nazi camps. During the protests against the live export of veal calves from England to the European continent in early 1995, some activists carried placards reading, simply, “AUSCHWITZ.”35 Other campaigns have employed photographs of a pile of animal corpses next to a photograph of a pile of skeletal human bodies.36 As with the examples from PETA and Steiner cited above, these campaigns imply that anti-Semitism — like racism generally — has been overcome and allocated to history. These signs and representations try to promote animal rights by exploiting painful pasts of violence against human beings, without regard for how these campaigns will impact people living with the legacies of that violence. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim has argued that the PETA “Animal Liberation Project” is morally defensible, because it draws attention to an urgent moral
