Marxist Animalism
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Someone has just actually asked me about head transplants: "Are there going to be benefits?"It shows just how easily Nazi modes of logic creep up on a passively accepting population. If one considers oneself belonging to the master race – whether the "Aryan race" or the human race – legitimising domination, all things can become acceptable. Even people who fawn over their pets will otherwise repeat the holy mantra along with everyone else, "Oh, that must be ok, it`s medical research!"If someone who represents authority and expertise is paying someone to perpetrate whatever nightmare, it`s not to be questioned.There was an experiment, the name and place of which I don`t have to hand, to explore how far people will go in this society indoctrinated with obedience and subordination to authority figures. Human subjects were told to pull a lever giving increasingly powerful electric shocks to someone being asked questions who got them wrong. They didn`t know the electrocutee was an actor and no shocks were in fact being given. They thought it was real. When the white-coated authority figure told them to shock the victim, they obediently did so, even as the actor feigned intensifying agony. Even though they hated doing it, they kept pulling the lever.The same experiment was done using monkeys – who are not , unlike humans, indoctrinated with subordination. This time the electric shocks were real. The monkey pulling the lever would get a reward as his fellow monkey screamed in agony. After doing it once, and seeing the result, the monkeys refused, preferring to go hungry.
http://hildakean.com/?page_id=168Hilda Kean`s article on John Archer and the Brown Dog.
From Hans Ruesch, Vivisection is Scientific Fraud. Two experiments pictured and described on page 12.1) Laser beam directed at the eyes of the monkey causes them to sizzle and explode, and2) THE AGGRESSION EXPERIMENT:"Scapegoats for homicidal insanity. Under the pretext of studying "the effect of pain on aggressiveness", two peaceful monkeys are tortured by electric shocks until they are seized by the same murderous frenzy that prompts these kind of experiments, and try to kill each other. At the (…name of institution…) of … With your tax dollar. Both pictures appeared in 1979 in The New York Times Magazine. Instead of excoriating such sick, obtuse activities, the big, trend-setting American press criticizes and ridicules the antivivisectionists who denounce them."Laboratory monkeys are captured in huge dragnet hunts in Asia, Africa and South America. The hunters shoot down from the trees the child-carrying females and can then easily pick up the youngsters that cling to their dying mothers. During the long flights to Western laboratories, up to 75 percent of the jam-packed monkeys may die – from thirst, exposure, terror, physical traumas and mental anguish. Thus the 85,000 monkeys delivered alive in a year to U.S. laboratories entail the death of 400-500,000 more, threatening the extinction of several species, notably the chimpanzee."
From the same booklet, on head transplants:"After transplanting numerous monkey heads, this "scientist" solemnly announced in 1977 that he was ready to transplant a human head. So far (1984) he has found no takers. Perhaps because word got around that it is not possible to make cut nerves grow together and to join the spinal cord to the head. The patient will probably always (if the operation succeeds) remain hospitalized, he will never be able to breathe without technical aids and will be unable to speak. But he will be able to suffer, as Dr. ….`s monkeys did. None of them survived longer than 7 days. Their face became bloated, their tongue thickened, and their eyelids kept swelling until they closed down – forever."(Picture): Dr. … (name omissions are mine – J.O.) strikes a "scientific" pose observing one of his moribund patients, as blood trickles incessantly from nose and mouth.(Picture 2) "The isolated brain of a monkey is supposed to be reacting to the croaking of a metal frog."3: Preliminary to his transplants, Dr. …. did various experiments, like emptying the brain of all blood, refrigerating the bloodless brain, then pumping the blood back in again. Anyone interested in a new head or body should write to: ………………"
CHILLING MARXIST PREDICTIONS FROM CHILLING MARXISTS:(from Jim Mason: An Unnatural Order)"Those who would have turned the world upside down still would have kept humanity at the top, and in control with an iron hand. The left`s campaign against slavery and exploitation has stopped well short of humans` relations with the rest of the living world. A stark example is longshoreman.philosopher/union-hero Eric Hoffer, who in the 1960s wrote of his hopes that technological man could completely and finally conquer nature. With working-class honesty and directness, Hoffer echoes Bacon`s aggressive machismo as he explains how to achieve paradise on earth:(my italics – J.O.) "wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whose land mass a fit habitation for man." Hoffer, in other words, would totally destroy nature in order to make the world more comfortable for human beings. The view is so dominionist, alienated, and ruthless that it would have made even Aquinas and Descartes wince." (pp 40 – 41, Continuum edition).And other socialists: "In the nineteenth century, followers of French Socialist philosopher Claude Henri Saint-Simon used it (nature domination – J.O.) to paint a glowing picture of how the industrial age could transform human society: "The exploitation of man by man has come to its end. … The exploitation of the globe, of external nature, becomes henceforth the sole end of man`s physical activity. …" Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, for all their revolutionary ideas, also toed the old nature-conquest line. …Engels (said) that under socialism humans would, for the first time, become "true masters of nature, because and insofar as they become masters of their own process of socialization." ……" In the 1950s the British Marxist Maurice Cornforth, … expressed a dominionist, human supremacist outlook at least as absolute as that of Genesis, Aquinas, Bacon, and the rest. In … "Man`s Mastery of Nature", Cornforth wrote: "It is the mastery of nature, achieved by intelligent work, that distinguishes the human way of life from that of the lower (sic! – J.O.) animals…. Increasing mastery of nature is, indeed, the essential content of material progress. …… People now go forward without hindrance to know and control the forces of nature, to use them as servants, to remake nature, cooperating with nature to make the world a human world since humanity is nature`s highest product.""(This last phrase echoes something I read in an SPGB memo among my dad`s papers last year sometime, in which it is stated that humans are the last things of any interest in evolution!!! -J.O.)
Got to be honest. Continuing my researches I've found a reference to the brown dog affair in a non-anti-vivisection source. There's a mention in the autobiography of the pioneer British Trotskyist Harry Wicks Keeping My Head who was born and bread in Battersea:
Quote:Most of the Labour women I've mentioned had been involved in or near struggles over vivisection and vaccination. In their image, these two often blurred. Before the First World War, Battersea Council had become famous for erecting a statue of a little brown dog which had been vivisected at a London hospital. A mob of medical students had come down and destroyed it. Battersea became the site of the Anti-Vivisection Hospital (which guaranteed to dissect no live animals). Those Labour women were important among the friends of that hospital. My mother was at least aware of all this. By chance, though, my direct experience of the Anti-Vivi was to be confined to paying two shillings in 1932 for having as many teeth extracted as could be while the gas lasted!Battersea had also seen terrific opposition to compulsory vaccination. In or near the labour movement, it was a regular thing to refuse to have your children vaccinated. Certainly, when my sister was born in 1915, my mother, who was not the meeting-going type (she had left that to my father), decided to pay a solicitor the seven shillings and six pence he demanded for getting an exemption form signed. I remember how distraught she was over how to get the money together, what with my father in the army. But pay she did. After 1919, of course, when the Labour Party became able to nominate some JPs, a signature on the certificate became a costfree formality. Not that Battersea was in the least unusual in this, in the late 1920s, I knew a man from Aberdare in South Wales, a miner, who dumbfounded our hosts by refusing vaccination. This was at the International Lenin School, I'm racing ahead again.I'd have been dumbfounded too. Why would members of the Labour Movement be opposed to vaccination? Just because it was compulsory?Incidentally, I think Wicks got some of the facts wrong. I don't think it was the Council that erected the statue nor did the medical students actually destroy it (in the end I think it was taken down by the Council)?
You are correct. It was removed by a new council and eventually melted down. A new one was erected, but out of the way in Battersea Park, in the 1980s and remains today. Foremost in its inauguration was the actress Geraldine James.
John Oswald wrote:Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, for all their revolutionary ideas, also toed the old nature-conquest line. …Hmm. Not too sure about that, John, sympathetic though I am to your line of argument. Here for example is something that Engels wrote that would rather contradict the above…. “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.“The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.“When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.“Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula.“Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”— Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man
This is most welcome. Thanks for this Robbo.J.
Guess Eric Hoffer`s nose is well rubbed in it!
Re: The Engels` piece – I also like what he writes in the same essay about parrots.Of course, fellow animals have language – just not our spoken human language. See the discoveries of ethology, including the book by Charlotte Uhlenbroek on the subject.We are more ignorant, so far, of other species` languages than our domesticated fellow animals are of ours!Did anyone see the conversation some years ago between a gorilla and humans using the manual language the deaf use? Another gorilla asked for a feline friend, got one, and mourned her at death.Elephants communicate via vibrations across distances.These is so much ethology has to teach us – hampered, of course, by bloody capitalism, which threatens to destroy us all!
Hi Alan. I wish to apologise again for the time I flared up at you. I hadn`t been following the posts. I`m sorry.As well as Charlotte Uhlenbroek, ethologists well worth reading are Jeffrey Masson and Marc Bekoff.
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