On Veganism

I am vegan.

I advocate being vegan.

But to just be vegan is to just do no harm. Being vegan is comparable to not being a rapist or a child molester.

Being vegan provides us with a moral compass, and the satisfaction that we are not complicit in the horrors of animal agrculture.

Being vegan doesn’t help a single animal. Being vegan doesn’t affect animal slaughter. People abstaining from meat have no affect upon animal slaughter because it is profitable to kill animals even if they aren’t eaten by people.

Every animal in the food system will die a horrible death. Even if vegans do not buy or consume animal corpses, they will still be put to death. None will be set free.

Factory farms are running at full capacity because we export cruelty and death to the rest of the world. It makes no difference what we do as vegans. The animals are going to be killed.

 What we need to do is fight the system, not bury our heads in the sand thinking that tofu is the answer.

Vegans have absolutely nothing to do with the number of animals slaughtered. Any animals not consumed by vegans are merely diverted to other uses: animal feed (17% of cattle are fed to other cows), fertilizer, or rendered for chemicals.

Furthermore, meat packers export animal corpses to the rest of the world, where vegans are declining as a percentage of the population.

No matter how many vegans we recruit in the US, we have no impact on the number of animals slaughtered for export.

Which means we have no effect on the Animal Holocaust. The Animal Holocaust claims the lives of 60 Billion animals each year in slaughterhouses. Another 2500 Billion sea creatures are murdered as well.

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The scope of the horror is almost beyond comprehension.Almost the entire human race is implicated in the Animal Holocaust.It won’t end by recruiting vegans or appealing to compassion, as most people DO NOT CARE.

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 Veganism is the bare minimum people can do who care for animals. Not killing and eating them is no different than not being a rapist or a child molester. It just means to do no harm. It doesn’t mean one is helping.

To help, one must get involved in politics, in educating friends, neighbors and the public, in recruiting, in voting, in organizing, in direct action, and in planning for revolution.

Some critics take exception to my attacks on vegan complacency. Many vegans think they are helping animals by being vegan, and get quite upset when the facts are presented that veganism doesn’t save a single life.

The truth is that being vegan is the very least one can do for the animals.

To put things in perspective, how impressed would you be if I announced that I wasn’t a child molester? Or a rapist?

My guess is that your response would be “Duh! Of course you aren’t. So what?”

That is my general response to someone announcing they are vegan. “Duh! Of course you are. You care about animals! Right? Why wouldn’t you be?”

Of all the people in the world who should be locked in solidarity for the animals, it should be vegans.

But instead of radical political action and revolutionary planning, we find vegans sharing recipes and becoming food groupies.

Websites dedicated to nutrition information, vegan recipes, and food preparation, are far more common than ones educating the public on revolutionary theory and political strategy.

The war for animals is political because it requires government to intervene on their behalf. Only government can make animal slaughter illegal.

As our present government is not disposed to do so, our goal must be implementing one that will.

Our forebears were faced with a similar moral imperative on the issue of human slavery. Had they adopted the attitude that many vegans have, to simply refrain from buying slaves instead of fighting proactively to end slavery, we would still have slavery today.

Merely being vegan is no different from refusing to buy or own slaves. That would hardly have stopped anyone else from doing so.

Ending slavery required direct action, sabotage, riots, violence, and eventually war.It will take MUCH MORE to end the Animal Holocaust. The only hope for animals is a revolution which will end capitalism (the primary cause of animal murder in the world) and end the legal system which considers animals to be the private property of owners to do with as they wish.

Revolution may not come in our lifetimes, but it must be part of long range planning for all in the animal movement.

Some argue that there are not enough vegan socialists waiting in the wings to establish a government. Of course there are not. Just as there were not enough Abolitionists to change the government overnight 200 years ago.

Creating them and changing society is what social movements are all about.

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Author’s Notes:

• I am unaware of any other blog with the Armory’s mission of radicalizing the animal movement. I certainly hope I am not alone, and that there are similar sentiments being expressed by comrades unknown to me.

If you know of other blogs dedicated to animal rights and the defeat of capitalism, please comment with a link.

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