The following essay is from Logos Journal issue 4.2 Where does all the war, racism, terrorism, violence, and cruelty that’s so endemic to human civilization come from? Why do humans exploit and massacre each other so regularly? Why is our species so violence-prone? To answer these questions we would do well to think about our [...]
“The comparison to the Holocaust is both intentional and obvious. One group of living beings anguishes beneath the hands of another. Though some will argue the suffering of animals cannot possibly compare to that of [Holocaust victims] or slaves, there is in fact, a parallel. And for the prisoners and victims of this mass murder, [...]
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, [...]
Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family — those who stayed behind — were killed in the concentration [...]
“Echoing through the debates about animals are unmistakable invocations of familiar racist and sexist ideologies about ‘natural affinities,’ categories authorized by nature, destinies inscribed in biology, and ‘scientific proofs’ of the limited capacities of the ‘other’ that have rumbled through the centuries to justify slavery, the oppression of women, and the ethically and radically based [...]