The Unconscious Holocaust (1897)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: “The Unconscious Holocaust.” Good Health: A Journal of Hygiene  Vol. XXXII, no. 2 (February 1897): 74-76.
https://archive.org/details/theunconsciousholocaust-jhowardmoore

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, animal welfare, dress reform, labor rights, slavery, women's rights

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this essay Moore promotes animal welfare and ethical veganism as part of an intersectional and universal ethics comprising adjacent social justice issues such as Abolitionism, women's rights, and labor rights. He claims that “the human mind is only half awake to the world of reality and duty.” Essentially, humans are “somnambulists,” still predominantly driven by “instinct” rather than reason (74). This state of things is vividly on display in what Moore calls “the unconscious tragedies of human reason,” some of which he enumerates in the article's opening paragraph:

George Washington was the father of his country, and a great and good man, but he held human beings as slaves, and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that “all men” includes Ethiopians; yet men who risked their lives in order to achieve personal and political liberty for black men, deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. A rich man will give millions of dollars to a museum or a university, when he would know, if he had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make his wealth work like slaves from morning till night, and feed on garbage and suffocate in garrets, in order that he may be munificent (74).

The ills of slavery, intemperance, patriarchy, and capitalism all spring from the same source: human's insufficiently developed capacity for reason. Cruelty towards animals is another effect of this incompetence. Moore believes that “[h]uman nature is nowhere so hideous and the human conscience is nowhere so profoundly asleep as in their ruthless disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world,” decrying the “cold-blooded manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavor at our cannibalistic feasts” (74). He also denounces in the strongest terms the wearing of furs, the use of feathers, and the shooting of pigeons and other birds for sport. For Moore, humans are “criminals of the most shocking hue” (74). “We call ourselves the paragons of the universe,” he writes, “yet we are so hideous and inhuman that all other beings flee from our approach as from a pestilence. We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have” (75). Only the human “plunges to such depths of atrocity” (75). Moore's graphic descriptions of slaughterhouses and the practice of eating meat are particularly vivid:

An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep, and working themselves to exhaustion cutting the throats of their helpless fellows, – unsuspecting oxen with limpid eyes looking up at the deadly poleax and a moment later lying a-quiver under its relentless thud; struggling swine swinging by their hinders with their life leaping from their gashed jugulars; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and yells of the massacred; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; everywhere corpses dangling from sale-hooks or sprawling on chopping-blocks; men and women kneeling nightly by their bedsides and congratulating themselves on their whiteness and rising each morning and leaping on the bloody remains of some slaughtered creature, – such are the spectacles in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the enormities perpetrated day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb animals of this world! (75-76).

Moore is convinced that reason will eventually prevail, that humans will awaken from their somnambulism, that “the same sentiment of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man's manacles and is to-day melting the white woman's chains will to-morrow emancipate the sorrel horse and the heifer” and “all the races of the earth shall become kind” (76).

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