The Greanville Journal

BY STEVEN BEST

A “downed” cow dragged to slaughter. Transportation to the slaughterhouse is just the culmination of her awful fate. “Downers” are animals who have been severely injured or become ill in the process of being raised “for food.”

Other “downers”—this time a couple of hogs, one of which cannot stand at all, also waiting to be taken to the abattoir. How much suffering must transpire before humans start paying real attention to our species’ atrocious tyranny over fellow creatures? Although many will surely deny it, including quite a few on the Left, it’s clear that human supremacist attitudes easily qualify as the earliest and least recognized form for fascism. Factory farms, by treating living, breathing animals as mere cogs in an ruthless industrial profit machine, are one of its most obscene manifestations. How long are we going to allow this to go on?

“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” —Peter Singer

“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue

It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet – animal liberation – that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it. [Read more →]

Tags: Obstinate Conscience, Moral Depravity, Appalling Hypocrisy Annals, Animal Liberation, American Way of Life, The Logical Misanthropist, CJO'S OpEds, Toxic Culture, Controversy, Animals & Environment by Greanville
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BY PETER SINGER
DATELINE: October 2006

Most factory-farmed animals are confined for life in completely unnatural surroundings, reduced to mere abstract units denied the status of living creatures, and manipulated relentlessly to maximize profits. Alongside Big Pharma, agribusiness is one of the most corrupting influences in American politics.

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals - also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations - is morally wrong. The American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a lot - and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses - but 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill about 10 billion animals each year. [Read more →]

Tags: Appalling Hypocrisy Annals, Animal Liberation, Moral Depravity, Obstinate Conscience, The Logical Misanthropist, American Way of Life, Toxic Culture by Greanville
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BY WILLIAM BLUM

President Castro addressing the Cuban people in Havana.

FROM OUR APPALLING HYPOCRISY ANNALS

The existence of a revolutionary socialist government with
growing ties to the Soviet Union only 90 miles away, insisted
the United States Government, was a situation which no self-
respecting superpower should tolerate, and in 1961 it undertook
an invasion of Cuba. [Read more →]

Tags: Indecent Plutocracy, Appalling Hypocrisy Annals, State Crimes, Middle East, Book Reviews, The Contemptible Media, Imperial Policy by Greanville
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