attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi
The Cycle of Abuse :
The link between
exploitation of women and exploitation of animals
by Christina M. Kennedy
"For primal humans... the animals in their foraging lands were the most impressive, the most fascinating living beings in the world. Measured in terms of the amount of human wonder they caused, animals were the most wonderful things out there in the world."
page 64
.
Mason's premise runs something like this:
(from Dear Gandhi : Now What? Letters from Ground Zero,
by Jim Douglass, Shelley Douglass, illus. by Bill Livermore.
Page 3.
(My emphasis and parentheses -- ed.)
Or phrasing it another way --
Those in power almost inevitably
designate the members of certain groups as "objects" -
"...In our society we exibit "somaphobia", a coined feminist term meaning hostility of the body, in which the body is less valued than the mind or soul. Thus, if you equate a subject to the body (such as people of color, women, and animals) it can be devalued and oppressed by subjects equated with the mind (such as white people, men, and humans).
In our history, we have treated people of color as animals to be used as workhorses, and we have treated women as pieces of meat to be used as sex objects. We have still not stopped this abuse for it is in only now in more subtle and in more hidden forms. However, we in no way try to hide the abuse we inflict upon nonhuman animals (the real workhorses and pieces of meat). Our compassion ends with our species. However, I contend that all forms of abuse stems from the same source -- our dominionism and value hierarchy."
"One of the great themes of modern history is the struggle of subjugated people to gain control over their lives and fate. ...
The privileged often regard these struggles as an assault on their rights, violent outbursts instigated by evil forces bent on our destruction: world Communism, or crazed terrorists and fanatics. ...
On the assumption that the basic human emotion and the driving force of a sane society is the desire for material gain, such questions have no simple answer, so we seek something more sophisticated and arcane.
...he was stopped repeatedly by Border Guards to check his identification papers. One ordered him: 'Come here, jump'. Laughing, he dropped the papers on the road and ordered the lawyer to pick them up. 'These people will do whatever you tell them to do', the Border Guards explained to Segev: 'If I tell him to jump, he will jump. Run, he will run. Take your clothes off, he will take them off. If I tell him to kiss the wall he will kiss it. If I tell him to crawl on the road, won't he crawl? ... Everything. Tell him to curse his mother and he will curse her too'. They are 'not human beings'. "
"In the late 1970s and early 1980s socialist feminists such as Juliet Mitchell and Dorothy Dinnerstein argued that the violence associated with patriarchy, capitalism, racism and imperialism are completely inextricable from each other, and that they each reinforce the others as structures of domination."(To which list Mason adds "misothery" or "human chauvinism". I am not personally acquainted with the work of Mitchell and Dinnerstein, though I intend to rectify that. I don't know offhand what they'd think of Mason.)
" We no longer live huddled in little villages and manors surrounded by the deep, deep woods. Do we then have a right to take the lives of animals? The unspoken notion here is that animals have souls and thus equal rights with men. A proper answer is given by James B. Whisker:... (wrote) Roman Catholic theologians W.E. Addis and T. Arnold, in the 1884 edition of the Catholic Dictionary, "As the lower animals have no duties, since they are destitute of free will, without which the performance of duty is impossible, so they have no rights, for right and duty are correlative terms." The authors note further that animals are "made for man, who has the same right over them which he has over plants and stones." Man could use animals for any legitimate purpose. "He may, according to the express permission of God, given to Noe, kill them for food...to put them to death or to inflict pain on them." The only limitation on the use of animals is that "it is never lawful for man to take pleasure directly in the pain given to brutes" but only because then "man degrades and brutalizes his own nature" (The Right to Hunt, p. 115).
.... in truth, the hunter is the great exemplar of manhood. Anything a man wishes to do, he must emulate the hunt in so doing. Ortega y Gasset states that, "Like the hunter in the absolute outside of the countryside, the philosopher is the alert man in the absolute inside of ideas, which are also an unconquerable and dangerous jungle" (Meditations on Hunting, p. 152). This is true in all else, whether it be a father who hunts for a living, or an artist who hunts for inspiration, or a writer who hunts for ideas, or a priest who hunts for souls. In attacking the very notion of the hunt (let alone its reality) the modern day world is really attacking masculinity itself. The target here, however, is not merely Catholic men, nor men as a whole, but God Himself. In the face of God, all humanity is to a degree feminine; hence the use of "she" indiscriminately by the old spiritual writers to refer to the soul. The soul is His spouse, just as He is the font of all masculinity: Father, Son, King, Priest, Warrior, and Hunter. Whatever our minor quarries in this life, we are all His; and as Francis Thompson showed so well in "The Hound of Heaven", He will take us if He can; if we will only let Him "
"The Hungarian Marxist writer Georg Lukacs once said that the essence of opportunism is always to begin with ‘parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself’.
This is an apt description of the current outbreak of mourning over the Yangtze river dolphin. It overlooks ‘the thing itself’ that caused the dolphin to die off: China’s transformation of the Yangtze into a source of nourishment, livelihood and wealth for millions upon millions of human beings. What the Chinese have done to the Yangtze in recent decades could be described as a mini-industrial revolution. Over the past 200 years, and the past 50 years in particular, the Yangtze has become one of China’s main lifelines: its waters support and enable vast amounts of agricultural work, which keep millions of people in employment and produce millions of tonnes of food; the river also allows the transportation of goods -- food, medicine, bicycles, computers, furniture -- through nine of China’s provinces, which cover 695,000 square miles of land.
The Chinese have harvested the river to make mind-boggling amounts of rice. And as one writer on the world’s rivers points out, rice remains ‘the world’s single most important food crop and a primary food for more than a third of the world’s population’ (6). China accounts for 35 per cent of the world’s rice production. A large proportion of this Chinese rice is cultivated around the Yangtze: each year, the river deposits more than 170million cubic metres of silt, which makes up the fertile plains of the Jiangsu province, and the Chinese use these plains to make ‘abundant harvests’ of rice (7). Millions are employed in China’s rice production industry, and their harvest feeds millions more Chinese as well as millions of people across the Third World. Remember that soppy Band Aid song ‘Feed the world’? Well, China’s harvesting of the natural properties of the Yangtze (or what some refer to as its poisoning of the Yangtze) is helping to do precisely that.
The river enables modern industry, too. Tonnes of fish are pulled from the Yangtze every day and transported to Shanghai and other cities across China. Most strikingly, 20,000 labourers are currently working on finishing the Three Gorges Dam. ... It will create a five-trillion gallon reservoir which will be 400 miles long and hundreds of feet deep. It will further stabilise the river, allowing freighters weighing up to 10,000 tonnes to navigate their way into the heart of China. The dam’s turbines will generate the same amount of electricity as 18 nuclear power plants, and will supply around a ninth of China’s electricity. Put another way, they will meet the electricity needs of 150 million people. Modern China harvests the Yaghtze for fish, rice production and energy.
Of course, vast amounts of waste and sewage are created as a result of all this activity on the Yangtze, and they have given rise to pollution and caused hardship for certain animals."
(Of course. "Hardships" such as going extinct, for example. Or surviving in an environment of sewage. We might respectfully request that writer O'Neill be subjected to the latter [though not the former] for a few years, and then re-examine his feelings on environmentalism vs development.)
" In "Trees" Professor Stone points out that at various periods throughout history various "things" were regarded as legally rightless, including aliens, children, and women. Although each successive movement to confer rights on some theretofore rightless "entity" has first appeared "odd or frightening or laughable," the progress of the law, and of morals, has been to invite more and more members into an ever-widening community.
Professor Stone proceeds to argue for a further widening by proposing that special guardians be empowered to speak for the "voiceless" elements in Nature: in effect, to give "legal standing" to endangered species and threatened forests.
For this twenty-fifth anniversary commemorative reissue, Professor Stone has added a collection of his most influential writings including:
-How to Heal the Planet
-The Convention on Biological Diversity
-Should we Establish a Guardian to Speak for Future Generations?
-An Environmental Ethic for the 21st Century"
Srimad-Bhagavatam (4.26.9)
quoted here
.
"Pain is pain, whether it is inflicted on man or on beast; and the creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible of the misery of it whilst it lasts, suffers Evil...
It has pleased God the Father of all men, to cover some men with white skins, and others with black skins; but as there is neither merit nor demerit in complexion, the white man, notwithstanding the barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right, by virtue of his colour, to enslave and tyrannize over a black man...
Now, if amongst men, the differences of their powers of the mind, and of their complexion, stature, and accidents of fortune, do not give any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of these differences; for the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man..."
"A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals"
by Humphrey Primatt
Quoted at, and ellipsis as found on
Agenda for a New America. Part One : The Politics of Vegetarianism
by Vasu Murti.
Chapter 16 - Voices Calling for Justice