September 7, 2010

Let them eat meat

Speaking of Affiliation, a correspondent writes about yesterday's column in The Guardian by George Monbiot (click the title of this post):

I always felt that there was something quite peculiar about Monbiot and how he never quite "gets" things that should seem so obvious, as in his dogged touting of industrial wind and his dumb war on Agas etc etc -- in this case in his bizarre, chillingly analytical defense of meat-eating (undoubtedly this is very convenient to his own tastes), he seems almost as if he suffers from Asbergers or autism in his precise, desperate totting up of percentages, ratios, and economics of "efficient" corpse production. Talk about missing the point of veganism, all the while he ignores the elephant sitting in the corner of this very tiny windowless room -- the abject horror, routine abuse, suffering and medieval cruelty that these living sentient beings are subjected to, on factory "farms" and little "happy farms" alike, and the fact that all of this nightmarish cruelty is utterly unnecessary, and that we have no right to take another creature's life and even their sense of well being. Monbiot would have made a very good accountant for Hitler -- what a truly dreadful little man he is, a very useful idiot for one destructive industry after another. And this is why I have so little hope for this planet and any evolution to a higher way of thinking about our fellow creatures -- because people like Monbiot, draped in the lurid polyester green flag of what passes these days for "environmentalism" or "sustainable light footprint" living, are listened to by people who used to see this kind of thing as blatant corporate brainwashing of the masses. But alas, no more; now they have joined the rest of the brainwashed greedy conformists -- we live in a real life world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where everyone really does increasingly seem like drooling idiot zombies.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism