Anil Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Book Reviews

Volume 2, Number 1, January - June 2003

Featured Books

(Review 6 - by Ronald Wright, USA, North America)

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FEATURED BOOK : REVIEWS ALL NONSENSE

Rating : 0.0

 Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson, Paperback, 6" x 9"
Lantern Books, One Union Square West, Suite 201, New York, NY 10003, USA. E-mail:eternaltr@earthlink.net: Publication Date 2002. xvi+296 pages, ISBN 1-930051-99-9. Price $20.00

Click to buy from Amazon

(Editor's Note: This is the only review we received which thoroughly denounces the book - and the thesis it asserts. It gives a zero rating to this book, on the 0 to 10 scale proposed by us. Interestingly the next high rating was 7.5 - by Biman Basu from India. All other reviewers rated this book higher than this - between 7.5 and 10. Two of our reviewers - Cecil Wingo from USA and John Williamson from UK - rated it at full 10.)

This is a terrible book with a thesis which is at best mindless and at worst disturbingly at odds with reality in almost everyway imaginable. The thesis is that the attempted destruction of Jewish civilians in countries occupied by the Third Reich during the period 1940 through 1945, often called the Holocaust, was precipitated by agricultural practices which arose during the twentieth century in Germany and elsewhere.

The tenuous hold that this argument has is at first weakened by the choice of title. Treblinka lacks one feature as a showplace of German Jewish extermination - bodies. Forensic investigation of the three sites generally called Treblinka has failed to demonstrate their presence. Various theories have been expounded for the lack of bodies such as incineration and subsequent pulverization. The complete lack of evidence given that the current estimate is 445,000 persons killed is incredible. The lack of physical evidence at Treblinka underscores the lack of evidence to somehow causally link the slaughter of farm animals with the slaughter of humans.

.. The book ... makes the argument that killing animals is the first step on the slippery slope to mass murder of people. The fact that Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich, was a vegetarian is dealt with by a combination of denial "he ate sausages" and trivialization, "he was a vegetarian because of a stomach disorder." ...This is all nonsense ...

The book none the less makes the argument that killing animals is the first step on the slippery slope to mass murder of people. The fact that Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich, was a vegetarian is dealt with by a combination of denial "he ate sausages" and trivialization, "he was a vegetarian because of a stomach disorder." Further it is suggested that the entire vegetarian concept, along with his ascetic nature, was part of a propaganda ploy used by the Nazis to promote the Führer.

In claiming that killing farm animals lead to the holocaust, it seems as reasonable that one could argue that the attempted extermination of the Jews was caused by homophobia. The Third Reich was extremely homophobic and indeed appears to have attempted to exterminate a large number of homosexuals during the period 1940-5 as well. It would be as reasonable to argue that homophobia was the cause of the holocaust.

Or perhaps it was based in the campaign against abortion. The Third Reich vehemently prosecuted abortionists throughout the reign. It could be argued about as effectively that the protection of the unborn was somehow a perversion of the killing of the born.

This is all nonsense. The United States of America has led the world in the mechanized slaughter of farm animals during most of the twentieth century. The scale of this killing today is powers of ten more developed than it was in Germany in the 1930's and 40's. If this slaughter of animals was the cause of mass exterminations of humans it is odd that the USA somehow failed to participate in such activities, at least in the twentieth century. The USA even refrained from mass exterminations of the Japanese people who were interred in concentration camps during the USA's participation in WWII during 1942-45. If animal slaughter was the cause of the holocaust then it should have led to the death of the Japanese.

-Ronald Wright

-Ronald Wright Dr. Ronald K. Wright is Associate Professor of Pathology and Director of Forensic Pathology Division at Jackson Memorial Hospital Miami, Florida. He can be contacted at rkw@rkwrightmd.com. Dr. Wright is on the left as you look at the photograph.

 Order this Book by clicking here.

 Interview with Charles Patterson.

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-Editor-in-Chief

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