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July 1998 Editorial: Comparison/No Comparison By Martin Rowe

It is, to offer an understatement bordering on obscene, difficult to talk about the Holocaust. For Irving Greenberg, all talk would be trivial: "No statement, theological or otherwise," he said, " should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children." The Holocaust casts a deep shadow over all attempts at finding meaning in the world. Yet, even as it prompts us to conclude in the face of such abomination that, as Tadeusz Borowski wrote, "the whole world is really like a concentration camp; the weak for the strong," it remains stubbornly beyond comparison, a viciously unique eruption of absolute evil in the world. Poet Paul Celan encapsulated the paradox: "Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world? Or is this not inexplicable, that it did occur? And has not this, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?"

Yet, over 50 years after Allied troops marched into Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and other hellholes, we still use the word "Holocaust." We talk and write about it, film and paint it, commemorate and and seek to explain it. We also make comparisons between the Holocaust and other atrocities: whether it is to concentration camps in the former Yugoslavia, the killing fields of Cambodia, the horrors of the African slave trade, or the suffering of animals on today's factory farms and in today's slaughterhouses. No less an authority than Isaac Bashevis Singer was clear in his comparison. For the animals, he said, it is an "eternal Treblinka."

What did Singer mean, and what might we mean when we talk about an "eternal Treblinka" for animals. Historically, the connections are closer than you might imagine, for as Charles Patterson notes in a forthcoming book on the Holocaust and animal slaughter, it was anti-Semitic Henry Ford's use of highly mechanized factory-production lines to make cars that led to both the modern slaughterhouse and the destruction of nearly all of European Jewry, millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, and others. The Nazis loaded their cargo--whom they dehumanized as "bacilli" or "life unworthy of life"--into cattle cars to ship them to out-of-the-way places where they could be destroyed. These specimens were used for scientific experimentation before they died, their valuable body parts or possessions reincorporated into the economy, and in every way were denied their dignity and familial relationships. Both the Holocaust and mechanized animal slaughter--more animals die in 12 hours in the United States than all those who died in the Holocaust-- it might be argued represent the absolute rejection of a respect for life, of unthinking and total slaughter made possible by the dehumanizing dominance of industrialism and the machine. For the Jews it stopped; for the animals it is neverending.

But the question remains: why make the comparison? What purpose is served? It is not good enough to compare one with the other merely to up the ante and quasi-criminalize those who work in the slaughterhouse industry, or to draw attention to the massive abuse of power that led to both the Holocaust and continues with mechanized animal slaughter. I do not think we are passing Greenberg's test on these criteria. These arguments do not trivialize the Holocaust because (as some would argue) humans are inherently more important than animals and that consequently the lives lost in Auschwitz were richer, more complex, and the loss therefore more tragic than the conveyer-belt victims of slaughterhouses. I happen to believe in the inherent rights of all animals--human or non-human--to live a life free from torture or confinement. Nor do these arguments trivialize the Holocaust because the systems of destruction were not the same. They were. Animal slaughter may be more understandable than the Holocaust--perhaps because our collective guilt is on-going--but the Holocaust is in some ways more viscerally powerful for us, because human suffering is something we can relate to more easily than that of animals.

The trivialization lies in comparing the two: something which unfortunately alienates many humane people of good will who still believe in the inherent worth of humans over animals. But, more significantly, comparison dilutes the intensity of both experiences, and--most crucially--removes the particulars of both events, replacing them with abstractions of horror, pathos, and despair. By making both a part of a universal condition of one group's terrible treatment of those less powerful than it is, we fail to grasp both the individual suffering and the ways in which we can stop one and make sure the other never occurs again. Ironically, we are disabled rather than enabled when our focus is withdrawn from the specifics of either the Holocaust or continued animal slaughter. Asking "why" impedes us from saying "no more."

Some have argued that, to the contrary, making the Holocaust incomparable only feeds the claim that the Jews are special--a view that can foster Judeophobia as much as Judeophilia. Others have said that moving it beyond comparison to the mystically unique abstracts it from history and, perhaps, reality. These points are well taken, and I'm not sure I can or want to rebut them. But there is a sense that at the heart of both the Holocaust and animal slaughter lies an individual silence that fights against the rush to a cosmic conclusion or comparison. Borowski and possibly Primo Levi knew they would not be able to understand the experiences of those who died in the camps this side of the grave, and both killed themselves as a consequence. While in the end we can never know what it is exactly that animals are experiencing when they are rounded up and hoisted onto the disassembly line, their silences--like all those who died in the Holocaust--are their own. While we should vigorously protest violence against all beings, and seek to end the obscenities of factory farming and mechanized slaughter, it is worth recognizing these silences as a warning to us that after Auschwitz, as George Steiner acknowledged, eloquence and thereby comparison "would be a kind of obscenity."

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