Animal liberation and anti-fascism

In the past, I’ve argued animal activists should focus on nonhumans to the greatest extent possible, given the scale of their exploitation and how few people are working to address it. I still believe this, however I think the threat of fascism must be accurately accounted for when deciding the best way to help animals in the present moment. Nonhuman rights and anti-fascism are directly connected.

It’s true that all oppressions and all struggles against them are linked. However, some are more intimately joined than others. If animal liberation is a political project, and not just a diet or lifestyle, it generally requires an environment where democratic change is possible. President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are trying to establish a right-wing authoritarian government in the United States.

I’m by no means an academic, but my understanding of fascism is that, among other things, it seeks a return to a mythologized past. I can promise you the past the Make America Great Again movement yearns for is not a vegan utopia. Perhaps there have been dictators who have advanced animal interests in some small way, like Ashoka the Great, Emperor of Magadha, but these are historical outliers.

It’s certainly not in the cards here, where Republican officials and media regularly present plant-based options and the nascent cultivated-meat industry as a threat to traditional values. Animal liberationists oppose the status quo when it comes to nonhuman use. Dictators, for obvious reasons, almost always support the status quo or a past version of this, including when it comes to the exploitation of animals.

Recently, I sought to interview a wide variety of nonhuman activists about how, if at all, their campaigning would change in the face of looming fascism. I didn’t get as many responses as I hoped and scrapped the piece. Still, one answer, from Merritt Clifton of the Animals 24-7 news blog, stuck with me. He recounted history of the early 20th-century animal movement, which I need to learn more about.

“Animal advocates and vegetarians were exceptionally dimwitted about the rise of fascism,” Clifton said. “The Nazis and Italian fascists liquidated all of the independent vegetarian societies, humane societies, and anti-vivisection societies in the territory they controlled. One Italian humane society, ENPA, survived Mussolini, who appointed himself head of it; no German humane societies survived Hitler.”

Animal activists fell for propaganda depicting Adolf Hitler as a benevolent, vegetarian leader, Clifton continued. They believed his effort to ban kosher slaughter was motivated by animal-welfare concern, as opposed to anti-Jewish animus. To its later shame, the American Humane Association praised Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. The European humane sector would take decades to rebuild.

In my own reading, I’ve found some inspiration in a vegetarian socialist organization founded in Weimar Germany, that was active in the anti-Nazi resistance, called Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund. One member of the group, Hilde Meisel, was involved in an aborted plan to kill Hitler. Obviously, we needn’t replicate all their tactics to admire their defiance in the face of authoritarianism.

So animal activists must be involved in the fight against fascism. Our political project cannot be achieved under a Trumpian dictatorship. While fascism has historically tried to co-opt leftist sentiment in various ways, the truth is there can be no progress for peace and justice on such authoritarian terrain. We seek to overturn the status quo. Fascists want to reestablish a mythologized past social order.