The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale by Karen Davis

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"The Holocaust & the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities" by Karen Davis is a short (and expensive!) book from 2005 that gathers information from many different writings on the Holocaust, the Nazis' treatment of animals, industrialized killing of animals for food, and the controversies surrounding all of the above. It's readable and insightful. The simplest case for making a comparison is that Holocaust survivors routinely described their ordeal as being "treated like animals", implying that animals are treated similar to those in concentration camps. But there's a lot more behind the controversies, such as the genesis of the name "The Holocaust", how it's decided what's a holocaust, whether using the Holocaust as an analogy denigrates those who went through it, etc. Very worthwhile for those who are interested in the use of the Holocaust analogy in the animal-rights movement. Here's an excerpt, taking out the book citations for the quoted passages:


In modern industrial society, the transport and killing of animals takes place mostly out of sight, though not for the people who do the work — yet how many workers identify with their victims, or become vegetarians? Virgil Butler, who worked in a Tyson chicken slaughterhouse for five years, said of the chickens, paralyzed with electric shocks before having their throats cut, "Their muscles don't work, but their eyes do and you can tell by them looking at you, they're scared to death."


Historian Enzo Traverso says that the Nazis created an industrial system for slaughter in which the victims were simply the "raw material" necessary for the "mass production of corpses". An animal researcher tells meat producers that "slaughter is different from processing in that the raw material is alive, has a central nervous system, can express emotional states, and has biological components like humans". However, in his review of Jeffrey Masson's book "The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals", B.R. Myers writes that research could prove "that cows love Jesus, and the line at the McDonald's drive-through wouldn't be one sagging carload shorter the next day". Only consider: in Salisbury, Maryland, a McDonald's sits on one side of the street and on the other side a gigantic chicken slaughter plant looms, surrounded by its endlessly sagging truckloads of chickens waiting on the dock to be killed. there is no clear evidence that the sight of suffering evokes sympathy or protest in the majority of people, and the first shock of seeing suffering can wear off. Even if it doesn't people can choose not to look. 


The fact that animals are suffering and dying for appetites that could be satisfied in many other ways makes some, perhaps many, people uncomfortable, though not necessarily because of guilty. People get annoyed that you're bothering them, trying to curtail their freedom and uncover a guilt that they may not feel, or don't feel strongly enough, so that some end up feeling "guilty" because they don't feel guilty, just vexed that they're being victimized. ... Try forcing most Americans to consider the suffering of the animals they consume, Myers says, and they will conclude, "like those German villagers, that the whole exercise has more to do with punishment than persuasion". ...


In her book "The Body in Pain", Elaine Scarry says that "A person whose pain it is, knows it effortlessly, the person whose pain it is not, cannot know it even with effort". While Scarry's subject is human pain and inability of other people to fathom it, what she says applies to nonhuman animal suffering as well: "It is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and finally, if with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the 'it' one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual 'it'."


The problem of apprehending the pain of others is increased when the others are in a situation of mass suffering. From the standpoint of onlookers, the individual is submerged in a sea of suffering. This is the opposite of the personal experience of being inside one's private hell while engulfed by the hell of others. No wonder people who have suffered as a whole populations are desperate to be seen. No wonder they resent having their suffering compared to the suffering of another group. ...


A fundamental difficulty in drawing attention to the plight of factory-farmed animals is, similarly, that every situation in which they appear is a mass situation, one that appears to be, as in reality it is, a limitless expanse of animal suffering and horror. Every factory-farm scene replicates this expanse, mirroring its magnitude of unmanageability. Except for the "veal" calf, whose solitary confinement stall and large sad eyes draw attention to him- or herself as a desolate individual, all that most people see in looking at animal factories are endless rows of battery-caged hens, wall-to-wall turkeys, thousands of chickens or pigs. What they hear is deathly silence or indistinguishable "noise". They see a sepia sea of bodies without conflict, plot, or endpoint.


To the public eye, the sheer number and expanse of animals surrounded by metal, wires, dung, dander, and dust renders all of them invisible and impersonal. There are no "individuals", no drama on which to focus, only a scene of abstract suffering. Their pain is not even minimally grasped by most viewers, who are socialized not to perceive animals, especially "food" animals, as individuals with feelings. These onlookers have no concept of animals as sentient beings, let alone as individuals with projects of their own of which they have been stripped, such as their own family life and the comfort it brings, which was their birthright in nature.