Monthly Archives: January 2016

Neo-Slavery

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Tomorrow is National Freedom Day in the United States, commemorating Lincoln signing the 13th Amendment, and celebrating freedom from slavery. In this second part of the slavery series we argue that the celebrations were and still are too early.

Neo-Slavery

Not only that the American civil war didn’t break to end slavery as we argued in the former post, it didn’t end slavery at all. In fact it took another century for slavery to really formally end in the United States and even then it wasn’t for moral reason but again for strategic ones.

For slavery to really end, it took watertight prohibition laws and the will to enforce them. Blacks didn’t have the first to their help and whites didn’t have the second.
The allegedly emancipatory 13th Amendment has an exception which is involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime. Humans like humans, used this exception as a loophole to keep slavery active and thriving by systematically criminalizing African Americans.
We are not talking about the notorious Jim Crow laws which were designed to further exclude blacks from society (mainly by absolute social segregation) but about the former discriminatory system known as the Black Codes, which were directly designed to further enslave blacks by establishing a legal basis for neo-slavery. Continue reading →

Reclaiming the Power We Should Have Never Given to Humans

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Reclaiming the Power We Should Have Never Given to HumansAmong the replies we have got about our post regarding the non-violent approach we thought there are 2 types we should address.

The first is that since activists who would engage in violence activities towards non-vegans would get caught very fast, it is counterproductive. That is despite the fact that we have clarified in the preface of the post that we don’t suggest sporadically killing non-vegans.
What we do argue is that killing every meat eater who wasn’t convinced by advocacy is morally justifiable, but since it is absolutely impracticable we don’t suggest or support that. It won’t help even one animal and would even end up hurting more animals by labeling animal activists as even more extreme and violent by the general public. It is a bad option which was never suggested nor implied.

Another type of reply is that since activists obviously can’t kill every non-vegan who was not convinced by their arguments (since they would probably get caught after the first one), they are not violent and speciesist for choosing advocacy.

It is crucial to emphasis that the point of this argument isn’t that activists are actually violence supporters and speciesist because they don’t kill meat eaters, but that they are because they don’t think they ought to.
We are not arguing that if you practically don’t kill every human who wasn’t convinced to stop consuming animals you are a speciesist. We are arguing that if you don’t think that theoretically you must stop (by whatever means it necessary) every human who wasn’t convinced to stop consuming animals you are a speciesist since that human is going to keep abusing. Continue reading →