Marxist Animalism
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“I’m not talking romanticism, but fact. Wez obviously feels no affinity with other animals. Dismissing the extension of the circle of kinship as “romantic twaddle” is the same blindness to the inter-connectedness of life that we see in every speciesist.”
😀
“Polish serial killer obsessed by slaughterhouses. Every serial killer I have seen a documentary on began by committing atrocities on fellow animals.”
Yes all of the respected research bodies recognise “every documentary I have seen” as the gold standard when it comes to research. In research terms it has the highest accolades and respect alongside other high standard research methods such as “I met a bloke in the pub” and “my brother in law knows somebody who…”
You might find the following quote interesting:
“I knew a guy that used to work in the stockyards and he used to kill cows all day long with a big sledgehammer, and then go home at night and eat dinner with his children and eat the meat that he slaughtered. Then he would go to church and read the bible, and he would say, ‘That is not killing.’ And I look at him and I say, ‘That doesn’t make any sense, what you are talking about?’
“Then I look at the beast, and I say, ‘Who is the beast?’Charles Manson – reported vegetarian and convicted serial killer
https://www.mansondirect.com/transa.html
Its a quote is from his court speech which is an interesting insight into his way of thinking.
He concludes
“We’re all our own prisons, we are each all our own wardens and we do our own time. I can’t judge anyone else. What other people do is not really my affair unless they approach me with it. Prison’s in your mind…Can’t you see I’m free?”
https://m.ranker.com/list/serial-killers-who-hurt-animals/ranker-crime
Guess you’re with Wez, Bijou?
Pointing out that Manson was a vegetarian, I see … supposed to clinch any argument, this type of thing. Getting tired, people, of stressing Hitler as the typical veggie?
Brrr, tremble. Vegetarian on the prowl.
Extermination.
As with humans, those animals that cannot profitably be integrated into the productive process are simply discarded. Domestication has focused on a narrow number of species; others not entirely domesticated have been preserved for recreational slaughter – such as deer. But many other species have been exterminated altogether, threatening the biodiversity of the planet. In ‘colonial India and Africa, the flower of British manhood indulged in veritable orgies of big game slaughter’.
In north America, the wolf ‘became the symbol of untamed nature’ and was exterminated in most areas, as earlier in Europe, while between 1850 and 1880, 75 million buffalo were killed by hunters (Thomas). In each case, mass slaughter was seen as part of the divinely sanctioned transformation of wilderness into civilisation.
The same mania of extermination fuelled the hunting of humans defined as animals, such as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, or the indigenous population of the Philippines, the subject of ‘goo-goo hunts’ after the US conquest of 1898.
Many other animal species have disappeared because of the destruction and fragmentation of their habitat. The animal industry is often directly involved in the wrecking of fragile local ecosystems, particularly when forests are cleared to make way for grazing land.Today we are used to seeing the last survivors of endangered species conserved in zoos. The origin of these zoos formed part of the same colonial mentality that exterminated so many creatures: ‘the spectacle of the zoo animal must be understood historically as a spectacle of colonial or imperial power’ (Baker) with the captive animals serving as ‘simultaneous emblems of human mastery over the natural world and of English dominion over remote territories’ (Ritvo)
“The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward (other) animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards (other) animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.”
Ashley Montagu.
To become a serial killer, it is a series of escalating steps and it does appear that cruelty to animals is one of the early stages and child psychologists recognise the risk and can intervene to stop the progression. I’m sure Bijou is better qualified to explain it.
Serial Killer is a bit of a misnomer, apparently the term preferred by those who work in the field is Multiple Killers, a late very good friend of mine was a Forensic Psychologist and he once said to me “that’s the problem you see, some of the bastards kill a lot of people all at once.”
It is not always the case that multiple killers always follow the same trajectory, for instance the Yorkshire Ripper didn’t. A few multiple killers have schizophrenia and in this case the animal cruelty is not as prominent a factor.
Cruelty to animals appears to be a common symptom rather than a causation for those who have anti social personality disorder. The development of ASPD is strongly linked with poor early years care, abusive early relationships and poor attachment patterns.
Animal cruelty is a very worrying behaviour in children, however it does not follow that all children who are cruel to animals will become serial killers. I have worked with children who have been cruel to animals and who have gone on to be able to develop empathy and care. I have also worked with kids who have hurt animals because although chronologically developed, they have not develped cognitively at the same rate. I vividly rememebre working with a child who killed a duck with a brick but then was distraught because the duck wouldn’t get up. He was still at the stage of development that he had not worked out what was an animate object and what was inanimate.
Mutual Aid
“Pointing out that Manson was a vegetarian, I see … supposed to clinch any argument, this type of thing. Getting tired, people, of stressing Hitler as the typical veggie?”
The point I was making contrary to “all the documentaries you have ever seen evidence” is that not all serial killers begin by hurting animals, however it is quite a common trait. Similarly not all people who hurt animals are serial killers,
Or put more simply “Not all vegans are nice and not all carnivors are nasty”
“Healthy children do not torture and kill fellow animals.”
Healthy animals do so. I rescued a terrified long eared vole yesterday in my deliberately ‘wild’ back garden, when I returned from the shops on my scooter.
Cats do this, just for kicks.
“Wez obviously feels no affinity with other animals.”
This is a mere judgemental assertion.
Oh, I know very well that not all vegans are nice.
Not all animal abusers take an illegal road. Many take a legal one.
If someone develops empathy later in life, then good. In fact empathy and sensibility are signs of a healthy adult, and we should expect them to increase with age, not decrease, as is often the case. I think we must agree though, that animal abuse is an unhealthy trait in anyone, regardless of age.
Working class violence – against (fellow) animals.
In addition to the corporate abuse of animals, there is a more diffuse field of cruelty, exploitation and extermination. Partly this is driven by economic imperatives – if the choice is between extreme poverty on the one hand or poaching an elephant to sell its tusks on the other, it is hardly surprising that animal welfare is low on many people’s priorities.
But there is also an element of the powerless venting their frustration on those they have power over – animals or children. Marx notes that the slave treated as a beast of burden or a tool ‘gives himself the satisfaction of knowing that he is different by treating the one with brutality and damaging the other’ (Marx, 1867).
The internalisation of relations of domination partially explains why some working class men take pleasure in killing animals. Even fox hunting, while organised by and for the rich, relies on the paid and unpaid participation of terrier men and a cross-class mix of hunt followers. This was evident on the mass rally in favour of hunting in London’s Hyde Park (1997).
The presentation of this as some kind of spontaneous cross-class rural revolt disguised what it actually demonstrated: the relations of patronage that still exist in the rural economy. Yet while many were paid or pressured to take part, it is undeniable that faced with some of the lowest wages and longest working hours in the country, a section of the rural working class is prepared to line up with its bosses to defend their miserable situation. We are reminded of Louise Michel’s insight that ‘The more ferocious a man is toward (fellow) animals, the more that man cringes before the people who dominate them’
Beyond humanism.
Human domination of animals has been justified by Christianity and humanism, both of which posed the human being at the centre of creation, the king of the beasts, in nature but not of it. The boundary between humans and animals was absolute and rigidly policed. Before the widespread advent of pet keeping, any intimacy with animals was suspect: ‘in at least half of the well-documented witchcraft cases which were brought to trial in England, the accused was implicated by the fact that he or she possessed and displayed affection for one or more animal companions’ (Serpell).
The construction of ‘man’ in this image has involved the denial and repression of human needs and desires. Thus whole categories of human life, such as sex, dancing and nakedness have been denounced by moralists throughout history as ‘bestial’. Women who step out of line can be referred to as dogs, bitches, shrews, vixens or cows (Arkangel).
The Italian socialist (and apologist for domestication) Antonio Gramsci wrote approvingly that ‘The history of industrialism has always been a continuing struggle…against the element of ‘animality’ in man. It has been an uninterrupted, often painful and bloody process of subjugating natural (i.e. animal and primitive) instincts to a new, more complex and rigid norms and habits of order, exactitude and precision which can make possible the increasingly complex forms of collective life which are the necessary consequence of industrial development’ (Prison Notebooks).
In cultures less penetrated by the values of capital, this animality is something to be admired rather than degraded. Thus an elder of the Dogon people in Mali once said: ‘Animals are superior to men because they belong to the bush and don’t have to work. Many animals feed themselves on what man grows by painful toil’ (Horniman).
In fact wildlife does provide an implicit critique of human society, as an inspiration, and contrast with ‘domesticated’ society. Despite attempts to portray all animal social life as amounting to a permanent war for survival, anyone with cats or dogs knows that much of their lives are spent playing and lazing around.
As Fredy Perlman shows animal activity is the opposite of alienated labour, much like human activity in ‘primitive communist’ societies: ‘A time and motion engineer watching a bear near a berry patch would not know when to punch the clock… the bear makes no distinction between work and play. If the engineer has an imagination he might say that the bear experiences joy from the moment the berries turn deep red and that none of the bear’s motions are work’.
‘Wild’ remains an insult passed on the free (or those who would be free), just as rioters continue to be denounced as animals and militant workers as wildcat strikers. But the flipside of this is that the idea of wildness as liberation will always have a hold on the imagination of rebels and insurgents (‘rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number’ – Shelley). If, according to Martin Luther in 1530 and Pope Leo XIII in 1891, possession of private property is an essential difference between man and beast (Thomas), then we should be happy to shake off our ‘human nature’.
A super film which focusses on food is the Czech film Little Otik.
Feeding baby.
https://youtu.be/TpJPeqXMbT4Going back to our friends in the slaughterhouse, perhaps they could be examples of one of Freud’s ego defence mechanisms – Sublimation – the unwitting substitution of a partial satisfaction with social approval for the pursuit of a direct satisfaction which would be contrary to one’s ideals or to the judgment of social censors and other important people who surround one.
Basically unconsciously stopping doing a socially unacceptable thing and replacing it with a similar, but socially useful thing. So for instance an arsonist becomes a fireman, a thief becomes a security advisor, a pervert becomes a gyneacoligist, an argumentative social outcast becomes a Trostskyist.
Freud apparently got the idea after reading about Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach a famous German surgeon who as a boy allegedly enjoyed cutting the tails off dogs.
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