Time to Break the Silence: 

One of the
​Greatest Evils of Our Time

​Less than a short 200 years ago it was considered legal and morally justified to sell and buy fellow human beings as slaves, and treat them as mere objects for use. 

Just stop for a moment, please.  It is not the historic fact of slavery that I’m trying to draw your attention to. Rather this: if you stood pointing to a fellow human, saying: „This is my property, it’s ok for me to work, rape, whip, brand and kill him or her,” the overwhelming majority of the population would have backed you up!

Always take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor,
never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor,
never the tormented.
 
Elie Wiesel

Of course, there were some of the highly sensitive empaths back then as well, probably considered to be sentimental and weak in their nervous system. There was, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stove who wrote „Uncle Tom's Cabin” providing great intellectual fuel for the abolitionist movement. Such people were, however, the minority,  even thought today we understand their view-point to represent a minimum level of decency.

But we are evolving and now it is time to evolve further. It is time to look at those sentient beings society today thinks of as property, ok to work,  torture, brand, experiment on and kill at whim.

​When I was a young student back in Vienna, Austria, one day I walked through the Schottentor tube station. Animal rights activists had erected some posters there showing real-life photos about the every-day life of animals in modern factory-farms. I took a very short look, as the images made me feel sick and shaky. Yet, I decided no longer pretend the horror wasn't there and had nothing to do with me. By the time I walked up the stairs and reached the street level, I vowed never to eat meat again. 

Keeping that vow I found very easy. There were times when people tried to pursue me to think again, stating that "the body needs meat for health," but I usually just ask back whether they wanted me to give them a "vegetarian preaching." When they say "no," I just ask them in return not to give me any preaching either. (Sometimes I wish to add that I have virtually had no illness whatsoever since, and that I am significantly fitter than the typical individual stating this type of "health concern," but all in all I remained private about this issue.) I consider it everyone's private business what they eat and what they don't. This is still my basic premise, and I shall continue refraining from preaching. At the same time, I feel an urgent moral duty to state my position in this issue clearly and distinctly. Eating meat under such circumstances is unethical.     

​Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and  thinks: "They're only animals."

​(Theodor Adorno)
​

We live in a world of dualism, in which many things are labelled  "good or evil" due to our limited understanding of reality. Yet, there are cases in which a type of evil manifests which is beyond interpretation or subjective opinion. Slavery, concentration camps are examples of such "absolute evil." They are inherently unethical, regardless of our philosophical view-point or personal opinion.  

Such institutions are inherently  unethical, because they are set up on the premise that another group (race, ethnicity etc) is inferior according to the arbitrary criteria set up by the abusers.  The abuser's criteria are nonsensical from an objective point of view (especially from the victim's). For example, skin color (an arbitrary criterion) has no relevance to the person's make up as a human being (objective criterion). The justification of slavery with skin color is nonsensical: from an objective point of view someone with a dark skin color would suffer the same damage being enslaved as someone with a light complexion.    

In modern days the industrial enslavement of animals is "justified" via another arbitrary criterion: human-like cognition. If a being is not thinking and speaking the way we do, their lives are considered lacking inherent value. Of course, that criterion is only making sense from the abuser's point of view, it is nonsensical from an objective (or the victim's) point of view. The objective fact is that every animal (human or non-human) regards their lives as inherently valuable (clearly showing through behavior, as they are running away from danger), as well as every animal is trying to avoid suffering and live happily. If you ever kept a dog or a cat as a pet, you know perfectly well that animals are capable of great feelings of sadness as well as joy, love and belonging, can dream, but can also be traumatized. A pig or a cow locked up their whole lives in a cage too small to even walk is suffering in the same way from such horrendous abuse as our cats,  dogs or we ourselves (!) would.      

The time has come to expand our compassion not just to people who are of different looks or different cultural background, but also to the people who do not walk on two legs, but who possess the wisdom we have long forgotten: how to live in harmony with the planet... We will certainly not experience genuine nurture eating the flesh of the tormented and certainly not experience genuine healing by experimenting on animals, but we will be healed by opening our hearts to the suffering and the kindness of all sentient beings...  this is the dawn of a new time, a new paradigm and a new ethics. Join us!