The events of the Holocaust and those of industrial animal slaughterhouses bear a multitude of bone chilling similarities. The most prominent being the presence of death on a large and mechanized scale. Through a post-humanist standpoint that rejects notions of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, the Holocaust and industrial slaughter houses are easily comparable and both instances of genocidal horror. A post-humanist view accepts that animals and humans have the same right to live a life free of suffering and murder, on the platform that they are sentient beings and cannot be placed on a moral hierarchy that positions them as less than the human species. This position also acknowledges the interconnectedness and similarities between …show more content…
Charles Patterson, who explores the connections between the Holocaust and slaughterhouses, even theorizes that Nazi extermination methods were inspired by the colonization techniques and industrialization of animal killing in the Americas. In either case, the process of animalization allows for the dominant group to oppress the marginalized group and subject them to ridicule and even murder (Patterson 28). Animalization places some beings as more valuable than others. It also wrongly denies a sentience or moral capacity to non-human animal themselves and advocates for their inherent difference from the human species. If one can separate a group of beings from themselves it becomes immensely easier to inflict pain and death onto them. Dividing humans and animals gives a platform for comparing and judging "other" beings (Patterson 25). Leading up to and during the Holocaust Jews were often equated with animals such as vermin or pigs (Patterson 45). Making them into animals made them seem less than human to perpetrators and their murder was then seen as less murderous or atrocious (Patterson 47). This animalization not only allows for oppressions to take …show more content…
They claimed that they were unaware of the final goal of Nazi camps. Most famously ____ said "I didn't know, I did not want to know, I should've known" (). In this quote ____ is explaining his self-induced aversion to the realities of the Holocaust. By pretending to not know what is truly going on, or not asking questions he was able to keep on moving through his daily tasks. Many trauma theories argue that these perpetrators worked under this condition of psychological numbing, where they could block out the realities of the situation in order to exist and persist within their outrageous conditions. Coming to terms with the death that surrounded them would be detrimental to their own health and mental well-being. Factory farming workers often work within the same mental state, unable to come to terms with or confront the death that surrounds them to avoid psychological effects such as those explored later in this paper. Physic numbing is a way of coping with a traumatic environment or event and can be seen in both Holocaust perpetrators' and slaughterhouse workers' traumatic responses (MacNair 277; Victor and Barnard 8). For example, Abraham Bomba, a Polish Jew who was assigned the tasks of cutting victims hair before they made their way into the gas chambers, as well as sorting through the confiscated possessions of victims,