The Forgotten Holocaust - Human Rights, Animal Rights and Oppression

Genocide, slaughter and the ‘Eternal Treblinka’

This essay explores the moral and linguistic implications of the term “holocaust” and argues that the industrial-scale slaughter of nonhuman animals constitutes exactly that. Drawing on survivor testimony, historical parallels, and philosophical analysis, it challenges readers to confront the prejudice of speciesism and the ethical urgency of naming the ongoing animal holocaust for what it is.

This website edition includes light framing and internal links to help readers explore related essays on personhood, justice, and the ethics of language. The main text remains as originally published.

Ever since the Second World War, the word holocaust has been spoken with shivers and dread to refer to the terrible mass extermination by the Nazis of millions of people in European concentration camps. In this article I want to talk about the forgotten holocaust, one which is frequently overlooked, and involves a terrifying tale of the wholesale abuse of human rights, animal rights and oppression of literally billions of victims.

What Do We Mean by “Holocaust”?

To this day, it is difficult not to associate the word holocaust with the Jewish people. One reason for this is obviously that the Nazis targeted Jews for extermination on a terrifying scale. Entire Jewish neighbourhoods were isolated, rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps where they were imprisoned, starved, tortured, experimented upon, dehumanised and killed in their hundreds of thousands.

The horror of this cannot be overstated, but we must never forget — and I don’t think that my saying this in any way diminishes the horrors or the murders of up to 6 million Jewish people — that it wasn’t just the Jews who were targeted.

The Roma and Sinti people (‘Gypsies’) were targeted, too, partly because they weren’t part of Hitler’s favoured ‘Aryan race’ and partly because Hitler hated their nomadic lifestyle. Even a cursory look into the scale of persecution still rife today against Roma and Traveller people shows that these attitudes weren’t unique to Hitler.

Hitler’s ‘Master Race’ ideology also meant that countless gay and disabled people ended up in the concentration camps, too, along with political opponents such as Communists and trade-unionists, as well as Pole or Soviet prisoner of war.

But it is the persecution of Jews for which the concentration camps are most well-known. Indeed, holocaust is a Jewish word with its origin way back in history, long before the 20th century atrocities mentioned above. It originally referred to a sacrifice burnt on an altar.

By ‘sacrifice’ we mean the religious slaughter of non-human animals to appease God. Until the destruction of Jerusalem’s ancient Jewish temple in 70C.E. animal sacrifice was common, even demanded, by the religion.

In a broader context, the dictionary defines holocaust as ‘destruction or slaughter on a mass scale’.

When I was growing up in the 1980’s people used to talk a lot about the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the idea that the unleashing of nuclear weapons upon the world would result in the mass slaughter of millions, if not billions, of people. The term doesn’t seem to be used so much now, despite the current world political climate and recent threats from Russia, but I don’t remember anyone ever saying it was wrong, disrespectful or anti-Semitic to refer to a ‘nuclear holocaust’.

There is also the less well-known Armenian Holocaust, in which between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire in an act of genocide that lasted from 1915 into the 1920's.

Is It Wrong to Use ‘Holocaust’ in Other Contexts?

So what are we to make of the oft-repeated assertion that the Holocaust ‘is a singular tragedy’ and that to refer to any other mass-slaughter event as a holocaust is disrespectful in the extreme?

To answer this question, we must examine the monstrous assumption that, if we can set ourselves sufficiently apart from someone in our minds, if they are sufficiently different from us in some way, that somehow gives us the right to imprison, torture and kill them en masse?

How can anyone seriously consider it morally or ethically justifiable to perpetuate ‘destruction or slaughter on a mass scale’ against our fellow Earthlings simply because they are in some way different to us — disabled, perhaps, or a different race to us… a different religion… or a different species?

The overwhelming majority of people agree that such discrimination is immoral… until, that is, we come to the arbitrary distinction of species, at which point they start coming up with all kinds of illogical and unsubstantiated excuses why that arbitrary distinction is somehow okay.

What we all have in common is that we all suffer in the same agony. We all want to live.

Slaughter on a Mass Scale: The Animal Holocaust

Every single day, billions of animals are slaughtered on an industrial scale — mutilated, gassed, electrocuted, and dismembered in ways that mirror the horrors of past genocides. There is no doubt at all that non-human animals continue to be subjected to ‘slaughter on a mass scale’ every single day, the victims numbered in billions every single year.

Does this not fall well within the definition of a holocaust?

There is this underlying idea that if you kill an animal without malice, without deliberately torturing them or being deliberately ‘cruel’ then it’s somehow ethical and justifiable to imprison, forcefully inseminate, beat, abuse, exploit, oppress and ultimately kill non-human animals to turn them into products we don’t need.

But apply this logic to killing humans and it becomes absurd.

What Justifies Mass Killing — Pain, or Difference?

To go back to the subject of the Nazi concentration camps, would it have been justified if the victims had been exterminated ‘painlessly’? Even asking the question is ridiculous, as mass-slaughter based on arbitrary characteristics, such as race, creed, sexual preference or gender is so obviously immoral in itself, regardless of how much the individuals may or may not suffer.

Speciesism: The Last Accepted Prejudice

‘They’re only animals’ is a common excuse for all kinds of injustice and abuse, yet non-human animals feel just as intensely as humans do. They feel pain. They feel fear. They feel sorrow. They suffer. They also feel joy and affection and desire and comfort and friendship and protective of their families.

Non-human animals are individuals with their own precious lives and they want to live as much as you or I do.

In fact, despite all the different excuses and twisted reasoning people come up with for exploiting other animal species, the only real distinction is that they’re not human. They’re not ‘us’ and that difference is used as a justification for exploiting, abusing and killing them.

This is what we mean by the term speciesism — the belief that belonging to a particular species justifies excluding others from moral consideration.

Yet, in what way is this any different from what the Nazis did to the Jews, or any of the other ‘minority’ groups in the concentration camps? This ‘othering’, this labelling of individuals and entire groups as ‘not us’, is the same sick, twisted and illogical excuse no matter who the victims are.

If we accept the excuse that “they’re only animals” as a justification for oppression then what is to stop people using the excuse that “they’re only Jews”… or Gypsies… or blacks… or gays… or women…?

People talk about the victims of the Nazis in the concentration camps as being treated ‘like animals’. They talk about the dehumanisation or objectification of victims which is necessary in order for oppressors to justify their abuse. Yet so often they use these terms and concepts without grasping their own inherent prejudice — their unquestioned assumption that being a different species, as opposed to a different race or gender, is all the justification we need to oppress, exploit, enslave, abuse and kill others.

This is what we mean by the term speciesism.

Why Drawing Parallels Isn’t Disrespectful

People often feel that by comparing and drawing parallels between the treatment of humans and the treatment of non-humans, we are somehow diminishing or insulting the human victims. But this idea merely serves to show just how deeply ingrained people’s prejudice against non-humans really is.

Imagine arguing that comparing the Armenian Holocaust with the Nazi Holocaust is disrespectful to Jews because the victims of the former were ‘only Armenians’! It would be abhorrent and racist.

It would be no different to minimising the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people because they were ‘only Jews’.

To compare the treatment of Jews by the Nazis to the treatment of non-human animals today only appears to be anti-Semitic if your view of non-human animals is that they are somehow ‘lesser’ beings undeserving of equal consideration and respect. In other words, if your view of other species is prejudiced in the same way that Hitler’s view of other races was prejudiced.

Parallels Between Factory Farms and Concentration Camps

There is no doubt that there are many chilling parallels between the way the Nazis treated their victims and the way humans continue to treat animals today, right down to the design of the factory farms/concentration camps and the use of gas chambers for mass extermination.

The oppression, the objectification, the experimentation, the living conditions, the mass slaughter, the labelling as ‘vermin’… the list goes on.

What Holocaust Survivors Say About Animal Suffering

Alex Hershaft is a Holocaust survivor who has dedicated his life to raising awareness of the ongoing holocaust that we, as humans, perpetuate against non-human animals. He says:

“As I became more familiar with animal farming and slaughter operations, I noted more striking similarities between what the Nazis did to us and what we are doing to animals.”

In his vegan blog, he states that:

“When we tell a child that the family dog on his couch is to be loved and cherished, but the pig on his plate is to be tortured, slaughtered, dismembered, and consumed as food, we are giving that child his very first social permission to oppress others. It’s the same type of social permission that Nazi children received that the Christian can live, but the Jew must die!”

Hershaft does not shy away from the ‘dreaded comparison’ between humans and non-humans. Nor did Polish-born Jew Isaac Bashevis Singer when he stated:

“What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world — about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

If these survivors of the Nazi Holocaust can acknowledge the similarities, the parallels, the same-ness of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis and the continued persecution of other species by humans, then surely the rest of us can open up our minds enough to at least address the possibility that we might be complicit in an ongoing holocaust on an even vaster scale.

Why the Word Matters — and Why I’ll Keep Using It

To use the word holocaust when describing the unimaginable persecution of non-human animals by humans is factually correct. But more than this, far from diminishing the significance of the Nazi Holocaust, it acknowledges the reality of, and highlights the significance of, the animal holocaust.

To use the word holocaust in this present-day context is to hold the oppressors to account and to allow no room for the semantic objectification and commodification of our non-human brothers and sisters with whom we share this beautiful planet.

For all these reasons, I make no apology for using the word. In fact, I believe it’s essential — because words matter, and the scale of this animal holocaust demands that we call it what it is.

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Further Reading

The Brutal Truth About Slavery

"They're Not People"

Other Animals Are People, Too