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Paedophagia – the sickness of society
They like them young. They like them very young. In fact, they love them young, and they love them very young. They want to get their hands on them when they’re as young as possible. You can’t describe them as youths, or even as juveniles really, because really they’re just so young, they’re infants, they’re just babies. That’s all they are, just babies. Just babies and they want to get their hands on them, and get their mouths on them, just babies. You see their eyes light up, their hearts race, it really gets their juices flowing when they know they can get their hands on them and get their mouths on them, those babies. Just babies.
Older ones are not so good apparently, and old ones are just not of any interest at all. Not as much fun, not as exciting, it doesn’t get them going in the same way, it’s just not the same, they say. It’s the young ones that they want, and it’s the youngest ones of all that they want more than anything, as young as they can, to get their mouths on and their hands on.
The youngest ones are the best they say, that’s what they tell me; I don’t want to know but they tell me anyway, quite the glee and the delight in their voice when they talk excitedly – they really get quite animated a lot of them – when they tell me about the freshness, the smoothness of the youngest ones; it’s the youngest ones – the babies – they’re the tastiest ones, they love it, can’t get enough of it, can’t get enough of them, the babies, getting their hands and their mouths on the babies.
One is never enough. Can’t just have one of them. More of them. More and more of them. Having another one and then another one, they can barely contain themselves to wait until the next one is born, get a bit of flesh on them and then they can get their hands on them and their mouths on them, and have them. It gets to be like an obsession it seems to me, though they would disagree with me, no doubt about it, they’d deny it, not obsessed at all, they don’t need them at all, they just happen to like it, to like them, those infants, that’s all, and they like having their hands and their mouths on them, it’s just something they like, something they love, and love doing it, but it’s not an obsession, it’s just that they won’t stop doing it. Why should they, they say to me, why stop it when they love it, when they want it, when they really enjoy doing it, and doing it to them, those babies?
What about the babies? That’s what I say. Do they like it? Do you think they like what you do to them? That’s what I say to them, and what they say to me is, oh, it’s fine, I don’t know why you’re thinking of them even, it’s perfectly natural, it’s perfectly normal, to want to get your hands and your mouths on them, those babies.
They get quite defensive then, quite angry, quite offended that I’ve questioned them and asked them why they get their hands and their mouths on those little ones, those little undefended ones, the little infants, the babies. They don’t like it, being attacked (as they see it) by me, being challenged about it because they like it, like doing it, they say lots of people do it, they know lots of other people who do it, so why not do it, who am I – who doesn’t do it – to tell them what to do, about doing it, about getting their hands and their mouths on the little ones? I don’t even do it, so what the hell do I know about it? It’s what they do, and it’s what they want to do, and it’s what they should do, that’s what they say to me, quite defensively, in defence of what they do to babies. That’s how they tell it. That’s how they say it to me, when I ask them about what they do, with their hands and their mouths on the little ones, the littlest lives, the newest born, the babies.
Can I say it? Yes I can say it, and because I can say it I will say it – I hate it.
I don’t like it and I have no choice but to say it – I despise it. I loathe what is done to the little ones, the babies.
I hate their pain, and I hate their suffering, I hate their violation and their destruction. I hate the way that we (no not I, but we as a society) corrupt them and kill them.
We – no not I – but we as a society, destroy baby animals by the millions. We bring them into life only to annihilate them. We drag them screaming from their mothers, in terror and fear as we violently pull them away, take them from their safety, their sanctuary, take them, crying and trembling from the warmth and the comfort, the gentle breath of their mother, from the soft touch of her skin, from the tender caress of her face, and we take them and haul them up onto lorries and lock them into cages. We brand their newborn bodies, the stain of slaughter, they’re ours now, and the mother bellows and cries for her son and her daughter but we ignore her because the little ones are ours now, not hers. To hell with the mother, damn her, we’ve got the baby now, the baby now is ours, for us, just for us, only for us to get our hands on and get our mouths on. We love it.
No, not we, certainly not I. I don’t love it. Who loves it? Who is it that loves it? Who loves getting their hands and their mouths on babies, who is it who loves eating babies? I don’t get it, I just don’t get it. Who’d like it, to eat babies? How can anyone like it? How can anyone love being a paedophagic, how can anyone be happy to be a paedophagic, how can anyone get off on being a paedophagic? How can they even like it and not deny it and be proud of it? How can anyone like getting their hands and their mouths on the cut up bodies of violently slaughtered baby animals?
How does anyone do it and not mind it? But they really do it, and they do it a lot. 15 million lambs brutally killed every year in the UK – not more than four months old (and they could live to be 15 years old!) and many only a couple of months old, just around 10 weeks of age. Just babies. Tiny offspring to gentle mothers left shocked and crushed by the loss of their newborn. A couple of months old, barely time to learn to leap and play, and yet trucked to a violent, terrifying slaughter in the abattoir.
Just babies. And then I see it. The paedophagic’s fattened, reddened cheek bulging, the diced cut of flesh squashed between jaws, chewed and chomped on as the mouth upturns into a grin of delight – ooh, that’s nice – and the eyes are alight with pleasure – oh yes, that’s good – and the neck swells with a swallow. Oh yes, oh yes, I liked that, god I liked that. A self-satisfied silent burp, the burst of air from the expanding gut that digests the leg of a lamb who screamed in horror and in pain, shook in terror and in fear, and who looked desperately for her mother, and tried to hide, tried to get away, but the man wanted her, wanted her dead, and so even though she had only briefly a tiny flash of time, just a tiny moment of time to feel the sun on her face, the wind through her fleece, the call of her mother in her ears, just a tiny flash, well now that’s gone, done, and so she is dead, done to death, just so the ones who love to get their hands and their mouths on babies can get it and have it and love it. Oh yes, that’s nice, loved it, they say, that was good. How satisfying for them.
I am sickened by society. Society is sick. It is a disgusting horror of a twisted, sick world with paedophagics down every street, on every damned corner, openly strutting their stuff in every town and city, on the lookout for yet another one to get their hands on. And they get their pleasure; the paedophagics get their babies, they get their hands and their mouths on the bodies of babies.
It makes my skin crawl and worst of all is that our society endorses and sanctions and supports these paedophagics, gives them everything they want and indulges their every desire, and those who profit from selling babies’ bodies get subsidised for doing it, for selling bodies, for selling babies to death, the government gives them money to let them carry on doing it because so many people want it, they love it, getting their hands and their mouths on the bodies of dead baby animals.
There is a sickness in society, an epidemic of paedophagia, and it stalks my waking moments and it haunts my sleeping moments, and it gives me no rest and no peace, and I will have no rest and no peace and I want no rest until I rid this world of its sickness, of the sufferance of the innocent, until the babies are left to live, are left to live and grow, to play and to run, to love their mother and be loved by their mother, to be left close to their mother to learn and to grow and to live, I will not rest and do not want to rest until every last one of them, the little ones, the littlest ones, those babies, are left alone to live, until they’re all left alone to live…
NOTE
And of course it’s not lambs, it’s also the pigs who are killed at just five or six months of age, the chickens who are killed at around just six weeks of age, the turkeys killed at just three to six months of age, and so on and so on and so on, millions and millions of babies, hundreds of millions, all babies, just babies…
A million screams an hour
I know the quizzical look, the glance in the eye that exposes a sigh of disappointment and disagreement, the turn down of the mouth that evokes words of disapproval. Too hard-line they say, too strict, too strongly-worded. Why, they ask, must you be so serious, so resolute, so single-minded on these matters?
My life is dedicated to the rights of animals, a defence of their right not to be exploited, violated, mutilated, confined, coerced, caged, traumatised, transported and slaughtered. Their right to be left alone from the violence of our hand.
In this I do not advocate half-measures or mere improvements in the manner of their exploitation but instead demand an absolute and complete end to the exploitation itself in all its forms, in all its places, in all its guises and faces, the gates closed on every livestock farm, empty cages in every livestock market, the machinery fallen silent in every abattoir, the nets cut open and recycled from every fishing vessel, the restraints dismantled in every vivisection laboratory, every enclosure deserted in every zoo. Every animal free from our harm.
Why demand so much? Can contentment not come from lesser measures? Must I be so severe, so intense, so provocative in my exhortations and exclamations?
I have a reason.
I hear a million screams an hour. With every step and every breath they are there, a loud, brutal guttural howl of horror and terror, despair scarring every second, the shrill nightmare of ended hope, the lost cry of life thrown over to bloody death. With every look at every tree and blossom, they are there, the piercing outraged yell that blasts out from their broken throat, the fractured neck, the shattered skull. With every word I speak and every voice I hear they are there, the forsaken shriek of utter hopelessness and loneliness, the desperation and trauma that explodes in a sickened shout of unimagined fear and shock at the blow of death from fist and boot and knife and blade and gun and bolt.
A million screams an hour, in my mind, in my ears, in my eyes, crawling on my skin, burrowing along my bones, rippling though my veins, bubbling around my heart, a twisting agonising wrench along my spine tearing at every sinew, every muscle, every cell of my being suffocated in a scream, again and again and again because out there, they do scream, over and over and over again, more and more and more, unyielding, unending, another, another, another, now, and now, and now, and now again.
A million screams an hour that shred every possible moment of peace into a cauldron of violence, cruelty and destruction, a million screams when the sun is shining, when the wind is blowing, when the rain is flowing, when the fog shrouds the fields and the mist clings to rocks, when sea-foam flows along the waves and children laugh and play, and the adults dance and sing, the flowers bloom and the tree buds another leaf, when the television plays its drama and the Internet’s bits and bytes spin through the world along the webs we weave and the satellites beam their data over lands and seas from a space where no-one can hear you scream and all the time I hear a million screams an hour.
I hear them, those innocent, gentle beings, so tender, meaning no harm to any, and every one of them I hear. I am so close to them my inward breath takes in the fear they exhale as they stand terrorised and traumatised, bound, gagged, caged, cold from horror. I am so close to them I can feel the hairs sweating, the wet tears rolling from their eyes cast downward in sorrow and such sadness at a life now ending. I am so close to them and yet I cannot reach them. I reach out my hand and my fingers are burned by the deep ice touch of the cold stone of the tomb of the untold millions.
But I hear them. I hear them all. A million screams an hour. Every one of them from a someone – it’s him, it’s him, it’s him, it’s her, it’s her, it’s her, it’s his moment of dying, it’s his moment of dying, and now her moment of dying, and now her moment of dying, and now her moment of dying, and now her moment of dying…
A million screams an hour. And every one of them is real. Do I dare to cry for them, cry for them all, weep for them and their loss of life? I do. Do I dare to fight for them, to ignite the world with a passion for justice for them? I do. Do I dare to defy almost everyone I ever to talk to, everyone I ever stand next to, walk alongside and sit near to? I do.
I will challenge every scream, demand an end to every scream, demand rights for everyone of those who scream, the millions and millions and millions and millions. And I will not stop.
I will be harsh. I will be forthright. I will provoke and challenge, demand and demand and demand again an end to the screaming and the dying. And I will not stop. I will not be silenced or side-tracked, or compromised or tricked by half-truths or lulled by lies or undone by deceit. I know the truth and I will demand the truth be told and I know justice and I will demand justice be done. I hear the screams and I will demand that the screaming be stopped and I will not stop demanding until the screaming is stopped.
I accept no bargain, no haggling over truth and justice, I am not bought with favours nor sold to the bidder offering complacency and compliance in exchange for silence. Because I hear a million screams an hour. So I call out for them.
My call is a call for justice and a call for us to see them and hear them, those millions that scream under our hand, a call for us to be justice and to offer to those millions not the knife and the bolt but kindness and compassion, to be compassionate and to be compassion, and to be loving towards those gentle beings and to be love, to be love itself, to be the voice that speaks soft words of love and joy, that in its softness overwhelms the sound and the fury of the scream, that in love and compassion those screams can be silenced for all time.
And so I yearn, and I dream, and I long for an hour of silence…
Awakening to Animals – The Politics of Compassion
This is the text of the lecture that I delivered at the inaugural international “Awakening To Animals” conference, held over the weekend of 17-18 March, 2012 in the beautiful setting of Lake Windermere, in the Lake District in Cumbria, England. This was a remarkable event, recorded for DVD (to be released in the coming weeks) with a wide range of speakers from across the globe. The organisers – Elaine Downs, Sue Reid and Julie Lines – did an extraordinary job of making the conference such a remarkable success, and it was my privilege to be a part of this event. I learned something new from every speaker, and indeed from every conversation that I had over the course of the weekend, but I have to give special thanks to Billie Dean, Margrit Coates and Nick Thompson for their very powerful and moving presentations.
The Politics of Compassion
I will let loose a thunderstorm of love, a downpour, an outpouring of compassion, a torrent of hope for those who thirst for freedom, bringing forth a raging flood to wash from the face of the Earth all the vanities and cruelties of humanity, to leave thereafter and ever after a sea of calm and peace whose islands are oases of comfort and security for the weak and the undefended. Now is the time to let fall the first drops of rain to herald the changing of the Earth.
We live in a time and a space when humanity’s cruelties are all too apparent; at every turn of the Earth and dawning of each day yet more evidence is made apparent by the light of the sun of humanity’s hatred of the natural world and its billions of inhabitants, doomed to suffer lives of brief but abject misery and pain. And yet, we know, it can, so easily, all be so different, if we choose … to look and to think and to feel just a little bit differently. And this truth which is within us is made all the clearer when we take a step backwards and outwards from ourselves.
This image you see on the screen is, perhaps, the most truthful and, perhaps, most beautiful, of all photographs ever taken. It is certainly the most distant. This photograph was taken in 1990 at the request of the late astronomer and populariser of science, Dr Carl Sagan. The spaceship Voyager One, which had been launched in 1977 to survey and photograph the Jovian planets, was at that time on the cusp of crossing the boundary of the solar system, some four billion kilometres from Earth. Dr Sagan thought it would be a good idea to send a request out across the reach of space to Voyager One for the craft to turn around briefly and take a photograph of the place from which it had come, our small world Earth, before continuing on its journey across the vastness of interstellar space.
This is the photograph. From four billion kilometres away it shows our world lost in the remoteness of space, floating as a dust mote against the backdrop of cosmic night, and caught by chance in the thin stream of sunlight from its parent star, our sun. More eloquently and more simply than any other image ever could this photograph expresses the utter sequestration of our world in the awesome immensity of the universe and life’s utter isolation in the protective envelope of one small, pale blue pixel. That is here, our Earth, our warm-oceaned, blue-skied globe of safety set against the black death and deep cold of darkest space.
Our home is our protection and we would do well to protect our home. And though our current obsessions with profit and possession, domination and conflagration seem instead to set our course on self-destruction, there are many who recognise the urgency for a change in direction, a rethink of our attitudes and actions, a re-examination of our intentions. An overhaul, long overdue, of all that we think and do, a revolution in the head, and a revolution in the heart. To embrace change is to embrace hope, and to have hope is to make possible the future we intend, not the future with which we must contend.
We can have the world we want. I demand the chance to create the world anew. As with all of us here today, my motivation is empathy and compassion, the desire to reach out and connect with all others with whom I share this small world, and embark on a life dedicated to concern and consideration to the needs of others. Life’s journey should be a journey undertaken in company, a united community walking in concert with each looking out for his or her neighbour, offering support, safety and security for all, as we find expressed so often in the selfless, altruistic natural world which is anything but “red in tooth and claw”. Our civilisation is expressed through our social and political structures, the systems we elaborate to define our relationships with one another.
For too long those political, economic and social orders have failed even to deliver a civilisation worthy of the name. They have not been designed to promote community cohesion or to provide comprehensive protection and welfare for those most in need but instead have been deliberately constructed to bestow excessive luxury for the few, a self-appointed, self-aggrandising elite looking out only for their own interests, securing for themselves an ever greater proportion of the world’s gifts at the expense of the many, condemned to subsist on an ever smaller share. The strong dominate, demand all for their own satisfaction and indulgence whilst the weak and the undefended must scratch and scrape for the fractions of the morsels tossed down from the heights of luxury onto the dirt paths the poor must walk in search of something, anything, just a little more than nothing.
Thus do our political systems corrupt whatever civilising tendencies we may naturally hold in our hands and hearts, debasing our desire to treat all with equal consideration…the organisation of our politics and economics has been co-opted by the greedy and the selfish, the brutal and the cruel, whose disinterest in the welfare of others is the mirror opposite of their interest in acquiring ever more for themselves.
We know that that is not good enough, not good enough by any stretch of the ethical imagination. And we know too that however little attention may be given to the needs of the poor and the vulnerable in our human community that it is our non-human animal friends who are exposed most shockingly to violence and viciousness, the devastation and destruction of their lives.
That is why I chose to enter the political arena, as stained and soaked with corruption as it is, to stand up and stand out and offer a new voice that spoke for those whose world was least regarded, whose bodies were dismissed as mere commodities and whose minds were shattered by the unrelenting terror of their daily trauma. On their behalf, I stood for election for the political party Animals Count on two occasions, the European elections of 2009 and the General Election of 2010. For the first time in UK electoral history, there was a candidate promoting an animal protection manifesto; a credible, practical manifesto whose central concern was to promote not only the welfare interests but the rights of non-humans. And so I said what needed to be said.
And no, I didn’t win … on either occasion. Of course I didn’t win on either occasion. The UK’s electoral system is utterly twisted and attuned to the interests of the major political parties only, with money the essential source of electoral success. With neither the cache attached to the “Big Three” parties nor substantial funds from a Central Office to bankroll relentless PR opportunities we knew that we had to run a campaign whose intent was not necessarily to emerge in first place on election night but to take our animal protection manifesto into the heart of the political process. And so the measure, we believe, of our success, was positive coverage and interviews in the national press and on national television, together with the distribution of leaflets and other materials into hundreds of thousands of homes.
This meant that when I took part in hustings events with other candidates I was able, time and again, to bring the discussion around to critically important topics such as climate change, the trashing of the earth by factory farming, the destruction of the seas by the fishing industry, the vile horror of the slaughterhouse, the damage done to human health by a poor, animal-product diet, the valueless cruelty of vivisection, the shame of a nation that claims to love animals and then murders them by the billion. The other candidates, of course, just wanted to point score, preferred playing the game, mocking the electorate with every false word they uttered. For the general election, a few weeks before polling day, I remember waiting to be interviewed for the BBC’s “Daily Politics Show” and was in the room with Michael Gove (Conservative) and Chris Huhne (Liberal Democrat) – both had just been on screen and tore into one another mercilessly and yet now, in the room afterwards, they laughed and joked, remarking at what positions they could each get in the event of a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Electoral success, for the professional politician, is all about power, influence and prestige.
And so why engage at all with the political system? Because I believe that the time is right to offer something different, something genuinely alternative to the tired, discredited and dysfunctional credos peddled by the major parties, who offer only sectarian self-interest to their targeted constituency.
They do not speak for all in society but only for their own closest social neighbours; they do not listen to the needs of all in society but deliberately turn their ear from the voice of the many whose needs are greatest; they do not see the results of their policies but close their eyes to the stain of blighted communities. They … do … not … care.
The inevitable effect of the politics of self-interest is a rip in the fabric of our society; isolation replacing solidarity, the group turned against itself.
There is a fracturing of community spirit, a breakdown of social cohesion and narrow self-protection that sets neighbour against neighbour. All of which leaves our non-human animal friends utterly cast out and ignored.
The late American philosopher Terence McKenna wrote about what he called “the balkanisation of epistemology”, the falling apart of a once common world-view shared across society, the disintegration of a united perspective, ruptured instead into what was described as the “curse of relativism”, an atomisation of ideas, the rise of individualism over communitarian support, the absence, keenly felt, of a mutual understanding of one another’s needs.
How then to create coherence from a cacophony of clashing philosophies and ideologies? I believe that the answer lies in peeling away the layers of discord to uncover our commonality, all of those things we share equally with one another and yes, that of course includes the things we share with those multitudes of non-humans as well as our fellow humans. When we return again in our mind’s eye to Dr Sagan’s famous photograph of the distant Earth and look upon this shared world from the distance of deepest space we know that whatever differences between us all that there may be are trivial to the point of irrelevance when contrasted with the thoughts, feelings and values, wants and desires, interests and concerns that we all share.
The method that we use to unveil the underlying truth of the interconnectedness of all lives and the intrinsic value of every life is to bring to bear upon our reflections the twin pillars of the evidence of science and the principle of natural justice. It is what we uncover through the scientific method that leads us ineluctably to the full measure of an ethical life. And it is by being honest about and trusting of the data we deduce through the application of science that connects us most fully to the world as it really is. That is why my political manifestos have been constructed upon a solid foundation of the results of scientific enquiry; the ethics of my politics shot through with the truth revealed by research from around the world.
The scientific method, properly applied, represents the most successful mechanism we have yet devised to draw out from the natural environment that surrounds us the fundamental attributes of all who rely upon that natural world for their survival. And what the evidence tells us, clearly, dramatically, incontrovertibly, is that all living beings have rich, complex psychological and emotional lives as well as a physical presence, a profound sense of who they are, and a desire – a genuine, absolute desire – for freedom; all animals whether human or non-human, are motivated by the same wants and hopes, the same determination to live out the fullness of their lives according to their own interests and needs.
Thus does this scientific data inform our morality – because we, as humans, know the richness and wonder of the lives of our non-human friends in this world, then we must – if we are to be moral, if we are to be ethical, if we are indeed to be civilised – we must give full and complete attention to, and recognition of, and total support for, the rights of those non-humans in our world, and offer to them the same protection we would afford to our human fellows, absolutely and without hesitation and without concession.
Though we are always human, we fail to be humane unless we grant to all the right to freedom, the right to protection from violence and coercion, the right to life. If we want our society to be a just society then we must acknowledge the reality of the data uncovered by our science and connect the truths thus revealed to our moral systems. In such a way we therefore see that the parallel towers of scientific enquiry and natural justice loom large over our lives and we stand in their shadow, knowing that it is for us to live up the principles of truth and justice, not for them to be bent down and corrupted to match our opinions and prejudices.
It is our courage, our determination, our integrity and unshaken focus on rights for all that will allow us to create the world we want to see. Every day I remind myself of these great words of Mr William Lloyd Garrison, written in 1831 in the first issue of his magazine, The Liberator:
“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation…I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
An American in the early 19th century, Mr Garrison was a tireless campaigner against slavery, calling for the “immediate emancipation” of all slaves – no half-measures, no concession – and also devoted huge energy to the women’s suffrage movement. Where he saw injustice he demanded justice. He knew, it was obvious, that no slave should be held in bondage, that the very notion of slavery was an abomination; and he knew too that no woman should be made to bow to any man; he knew, it was obvious, that all humans were and should be equal, that no mere appeal to skin colour or gender, or any other attribute, could legitimise the debasement of one before another. How absurd it is for us now to try to turn our thoughts to the mindset of the racist or the misogynist – what an affront to all decency to imagine that one’s sex or skin pigmentation should decide our status in society, should be a factor in our freedom…
Mr Garrison never lost sight of, never for one moment forgot, that his motivation must be justice for all, rights for all, and he would without fear or concern set himself against any and all whose opinions were simple prejudice and arrogance. He always was as harsh as the truth and as uncompromising as justice.
In this was he was joined by a near contemporary, Mary Woolstonecraft, the author of “The Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, a revolutionary in her time and an inspiration in ours. She too saw the connection between the rights of one group and the rights that should therefore, be afforded to all others. Her anger at the treatment of animals spilled out in a letter after reading about the killing of some horses by King George III, as she wrote:
“I cannot bear an unfeeling mortal. I think it murder to put an end to any living thing… if it has pleased the beneficent Creator of all to call them into being, we ought to let them enjoy the common blessings of nature, and I declare nothing gives me as much pleasure as to contribute to the happiness of the most insignificant creature”
In her defence of rights and her call for justice she showed no fear and refused to be cowed by the bile and vitriol her words inspired in those who preferred an unjust world, a corrupted and prejudiced society. Status, influence, power – all of this meant nothing to William and Mary, they were going to stand up for justice anyway. Titles and power disappear in a puff of irrelevance when it comes to the defence of rights, when it comes to us to be as harsh as the truth and as uncompromising as justice.
No deference to authority will suffice and no docility in the face of forces ranged against us could ever be acceptable. When we know, as we do, that all animal lives, whether human or not, should be lived within the protective shield of the right to freedom, the right to protection from harm, the right to life, then we know also that which we must say and that which we must do, if we are to uphold the twin standards of scientific integrity and natural justice, if we will indeed dare to be as harsh as the truth and as uncompromising as justice.
Where we see injustice we must make the demand for justice. Where we see violence, cruelty and killing promoted and promulgated in our society, normalised and justified because “it’s for entertainment, it’s for research, it’s .. for dinner”, there we must step up, step out and stand against that violence and killing, on every corner, down every street, throughout every day – we make ourselves heard. We do not equivocate or prevaricate, we do not excuse or make apology, nor ever sanction or endorse ourselves those horrors done. We know the truth; therefore we tell the truth. We know what justice means; therefore we demand that justice be seen.
This is the courage of the one who will not be a bystander. We know the violence that exists in our world, the brutal cruelty that crashes down upon the gentle minds of our non-human animal friends, captured and confined on our farms and slaughterhouses, our laboratories and zoos and I do not need to dwell on the desperate details here today. But it is appropriate to restate our commitment not only to defend what is right and just but to make the world right and just.
It is a famous saying, many people repeat and repost it daily on Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet, and I am sure it is nothing new to anyone here today to repeat once more Mahatma Ghandi’s oft-quoted demand to us to, “be the change you want to see in the world.” Those are fine words, all well and good, but not really ultimately good enough and we must be bold and go further and be not just that change we are so desperate to see but be also the revolutionaries, the William Garrison and Mary Woolstonecroft of our day, to create that world, to remake and remould the world in the shape of justice. We cannot exist only in a bubble, living principled, decent lives of honesty and integrity if we are also in near-isolation from our peers, invisible to society, our thoughts and deeds unknown and unacknowledged, impacting no-one, changing nothing.
Justice is not a philosophy, it is an action. It is always an action. Justice fails when inaction takes precedence, when fear of challenging authority, fear of “stepping out of line”, fear of the consequences of raising the voice, of raising the hand to say “No”, takes over and the body remains still, inert, the throat mute, the mind silent and one becomes, a bystander.
We are all too aware of what happens when people become bystanders, when fear or self-interest wins and justice loses. We know what that looks like, we know the inevitable destination to which the undefended are dragged, the shape at the end of the line for those who would not be saved. This place, this space of abyssal horror, Auschwtiz-Birkenau.
This is the spur of the railway line that took hundreds of thousands to their immediate stinking, filthy deaths in the murder chambers of this, the most technically advanced of the Nazis’ Vernichtungslager or extermination camps.
Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other camps, and the death pits where two million were shot to death, were permitted to exist in the world because too many stood on the side of the road and watched and did not act, or stayed away and did not act, who refused to move and refused to speak. We are far enough away from the events now and we know enough now about those events to know that there was no inevitability to the construction of the extermination camps, that Nazi Germany did not represent some all-powerful, terrifying monster of invincibility. But for six million or more, the bystanders won, and the world was left to wonder…
What horrified the world then and still wrecks our sensibilities now is not what transpired at Auschwitz but what transgressed, a wholly new order of criminal violence and hate, an utter inversion of morality, described then as the Anus Mundi, the arse of the world; beyond the gates, once passed through those gates, was a different moral universe that permitted, endorsed and acted out a meticulous slaughter of the innocent in forensic, technical detail, an unparalleled opportunity for the full force of hate to take its vengeance against the broken bodies of the weak and the undefended.
It represented such a horror that many thought the world could not recover, would never be again what it was before. The German cultural historian and philosopher Theodor Adorno was so shaken that he said that there could be “no poetry after Auschwitz”, as though language had to collapse in on itself, overwhelmed by the crushing gravitational force of the brute fact of Auschwitz.
Theodor Adorno was nearly right, he just used slightly the wrong words; not his fault, he was trying to articulate an unimagined reality of cruelty. Of course there was, is, poetry after Auschwitz, and extraordinary poetry too, some of it reflecting even on Auschwitz. Poetry lives on. Poetry must be, as John Keats tells, “beauty is truth; truth, beauty” and there is still beauty in our world despite Auschwitz. What Theodor Adorno should have said was “no poetry in Auschwitz”..for all of the things we now know of what happened beyond those gates, all the stories and the testimony that has come down to us, tell us that there was no poetry in that place – there were many things, writings and drawings, photographs, love even on rare occasion, but no poetry, the truth of Auschwitz is not a poetic truth, it refuses poetry for it refuses beauty, it is ugly only, a thick, ugly scar on the tortured face of humanity.
I have spent time on this subject today because it is of utter relevance to our world, our present, for we have our own Auschwitz-Birkenau, our own extermination camps … the factory farms and slaughterhouses, the research laboratories, that condemn the innocent to lives of sufferance and then, their murder.
The slaughterhouse is our Anus Mundi, our dirtiest stinking hole of horror, our nightmare of crime. There is too no poetry in the slaughterhouse, no words of beauty that could ever be composed in the stun room, the sticking room, the death pit. Beyond the gate of the slaughterhouse is a different space, a transgression, a wholly-other moral order that twists and corrupts the structure of the mind, that permits, endorses and allows to be acted out, that unleashes acts of staggering cruelty and viciousness by the powerful against the weak and the undefended in forensic, technical detail, the machinery of murder meticulously arrayed against the innocent, the bloody precision of unrestrained hatred.
We pass through those gates into a morally-inverted deathscape, a space deliberately arranged for nothing but violence and killing, where all common measures of decency and goodness, justice and mercy, kindness and compassion, must fall and fail, are revoked and replaced by the standard of the brute and the bully, the cowardly killer who stands tough, armed with weapons of mass destruction, over the shaking, terrified body of a small animal and even then the killer kicks and beats, punches, stabs and spits, screams and only then delivers the fatal shock.
The Nazis may have lost the war but they tore a scar in the heart and they won over the mindset of humanity. How else can we adequately describe the reality of the slaughterhouse? We live in a Nazi world.
Much criticism has been levelled at those who have described this direct connection between what the Nazis did then and what we do now, great thinkers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, and great writers such as Charles Patterson, but they are just choosing to be honest, and what else would we ask for from our thinkers and writers but to be honest? Do we not now prefer a William Lloyd Garrison and Mary Woolstonecroft to their many contemporaries whose minds remained closed and who spoke only lies and denied the truth?
Who will be our hero and heroine? Will we want the bystander to be the standard-bearer for our time, to represent us on the field of history? As dawn breaks open a new day, who do we want to see – William and Mary or the unknown man and woman skulking in the shadow, eyes looking down not wanting to catch the notice of anyone, never hearing, never seeing, never feeling?
Auschwitz still exists as a museum, its murder chambers detonated and destroyed, silent witness now not only to mass murder but to the mindset of the bystander, the betrayal of justice. But our slaughterhouses are anything but museum pieces, many of the killing lines roll 24 hours a day, ever more victims are drawn and dragged daily through the gates to a filthy, stinking murder only hours away. And we have to do something about it.
If we are going to be awake to animals, then we must be awake to the demand to act now to put a stop to the most egregious, most pointless and most cruel of humanity’s evils: the destruction of trillions of land and sea-dwelling animals every year to satiate our hunger. This is something that is not only a despicable act but also a most foolish act given all of the scientific evidence that describes us so clearly as herbivores, a naturally plant-eating species for whom the consumption of the flesh and fluids of animals represents an act of health-damaging self-harm. When we recognise the evidence of science we of course recognise the kinship we have with those with whom we share much of our evolutionary heritage, our biochemistry and our physiology; we recognise that, like them, we survive best on plant matter, when we eat what is natural for our kind – the fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds which are ours to take in our share from nature’s garden.
This not only aids and strengthens our health but also impresses upon us an ethical focus to regard and treat other species in a way that is also natural for our kind. We do not have to kill to live; we never have to kill; our life can be lived in fullness and richness and we never have to kill; none need ever die for us to survive. We can live and live well and never kill. Never, ever kill.
This is the greatest, grandest truth of them all. This is the simplest and most special truth of them all. This is the truth that can set billions free.
And we who have acknowledged the truth must be the ones who will not be bystanders. We who are awake to the lives and minds of those other animals with whom we share our lives must be the ones to awaken the imagination, the heart and the soul of all in society to the richness and joy of this most noble of truths – that we can all live lives free from causing suffering and pain, free from the destruction of other lives, free at last from the enslaving lie that lashes us to a bloodied past. Free to walk into a future in which love and compassion are the inspiration for our society’s daily acts, a drama whose story is one of kindness, selflessness and common consideration for the needs of all in our world.
We can have the world that we want. We can and we must politicise love and compassion, embed our economics with the full strength of the moral life. It is possible to articulate the vision of a society where the “drive for growth” is in wisdom and emotional maturity not the acquisition of yet more material possessions, where we place our faith and hope in empathy and not in money markets. A world in which wealth is calculated according to the richness of our inner lives not the flaunted luxury of consumer items, to be discarded and replaced with the later, greater, newer version the moment they are possessed.
It is the politics of compassion, predicated upon a solid foundation of scientific evidence, that can allow us to reshape the world for the benefit of all. Currently, our overriding political and economic doctrines are skewed towards self-interest only which not only leaves much of the human community on the outside looking in at the feast on the table, but also defines our non-human friends as mere property, pure product, commodities only with no safety or sanctuary from the barbarity of industry which seeks only to render them from living, feeling beings into parcelled, packaged remains on the supermarket shelf. Because of this legal positioning of the status of non-humans as functional objects that can be possessed and then destroyed with impunity, then wherever we position ourselves on the political spectrum – whether right or left or some imagined, idealised centre – is of no consequence to those non-humans, for the spectrum itself has the shade of ingrained prejudice that traps in the glare of its dark light all species other than human in a nightmare of annihilation.
Our politics must be informed with something other than an historical allegiance to a left or right ideology whose mantras have never provided what was promised, have never delivered on what was claimed and have never granted and will never grant to the most vulnerable the protection they deserve which the strong can afford to give.
The politics of compassion offers us all the solution which is so desperately needed. By taking full and honest account of what the data from our sciences tell us, and imbuing our philosophy with the principles of natural justice, we derive a politics of rights that is awake to the reality of the needs of all in our world, irrespective of species as well as, of course, irrespective of gender or skin colour, and which recognises the intrinsic value of all lives and the utter certainty that every life is unique, precious and worthy of being provided for and protected from every persecution.
The politics of compassion are ours, and ours to deliver to the world.
We can regard again Dr Sagan’s extraordinary image and see, with our hearts, that that faintest of small, blue globes is all that we know and know too our role in securing a future upon its rocky and watery surface for all who cling to those rocks, swim those waters and ride the winds that roll the air.
Every hope for every living being is ours to offer. Every gesture of kindness is ours to express. Every expression of kinship is ours to give. Every gift of love is ours to grant. Every chance of life is ours to award. Every place of safety is ours to provide. Every embrace of protection is ours to bestow.
With our hands we can shape the future. With our eyes we can see those who need, with our ears we can respond to their cries, with our voices we can make them heard.
With our minds we can offer rights, and with our hearts we can offer love.
With our love we will recreate the world in the image of love. It is love that will define us and it is love that will inspire us to break open the heavens to let loose that thunderstorm of love, that overwhelming outpouring of compassion, offered to all without exception. Because we are alive, we are awake, and because we are awake, we are love. We are awake to animals because we are alive to love.
Lecture at “Awakening to Animals” conference
I will be delivering a 1-hour lecture at the “Awakening to Animals” conference, taking place over the weekend of 17th-18th March, 2012, at the Low Wood Bay Hotel, Windermere in the heart of the Lake District in England.
My lecture is titled “the Politics of Compassion” and the synopsis is as follows:
My talk will demand that we place compassion at the heart of our political processes and social policies, and for us to place our faith in empathy and not in money markets, and to create a society where the “drive for growth” is in wisdom and emotional maturity not the acquistion of material possessions. I will open with the visual presentation of the famous “pale blue dot” image of Dr Carl Sagan and this will lead into the urgent call for change. I will discuss how the evidence of science leads directly to the evidence for compassion. I will discuss the “diseases” of social docility, deference to authority and the problem of being a bystander to socially-accepted violence, using the examples of William Lloyd Garrison and Mary Woolstonecraft as representatives of the solution. I will explain what Theodor Adorno really meant by his dictum – “No poetry after Auschwitz” – and how this relates to the treatment of animals in our society with explicit reference to the factory farm and the slaughterhouse. I will explain why existing political, economic and social structures fail to create the necessary conditions for a compassionate civilisation and what changes are required to generate meaninful, practical change that better protects all lives in our world. I close with a further reflection on Dr Sagan’s “pale blue dot” and what we can do to awaken our sense of community with all other living beings.”
If you can get along to this fabulous event then please do so, it promises to be an extraordinary weekend …