The Nomadic Alternative – Page 269

The veneration of animals intensifies with the degradation of men. "To turn and live with animals" has been the convenient refuge of those who have given the human condition up as a bad job and have abdicated their right to speak of it. Immoderate association with animals has inspired many a pious rant on the innate nastiness of man and the squalor of his behaviour compared to the more moral beast. Such assertions are unhelpful, and their writers almost invariably up to mischief. Our friend Diogenes the Cynic took the full measure of animalitarian thought. "Plato", wrote Diogenes Laertus, "had defined man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded." Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture room with the words "Here is Plato's Man."

What Hemingway called the "almost professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts" have shown themselves in history to be less sensitive to human lives or any moral scruples, than those who have not attached themselves to animals. Those who committed the Beverley Hills murders "placed no value on human life, but animal life, including insects and snakes was sacrosanct." For this reason they were vegetarians, but graffitti covered the scene of the crime reading "Pigs!" Rudolf Hess outdid Hitler in his vegetarian picnics, and cannibalism, we remember, is principally a sacrifice that the green things may grow.

Warfare is not a human activity. The violence of man to man assumes at least one of the protagonists to be sub-human. Having established that the victims were 'human orientals' (though there must have been some doubt for it to have been mentioned) the United States Army court martial was free to sentence Lt. Calley for murder. But the military indoctrination, ultimately responsible for the crime, had first employed innate faculties in Lt. Calley's, albeit stupid, brain, which were specifically intended for the slaughter of animals, and had instilled into him the idea that an infernal menace - in this case a Communist plague - threatened his mother country.