Völkisch Whiteness and reductive views on Animality

Völkisch whiteness and reductive views on animality

Obstacles in the German-speaking Animal Rights and Animal Liberation movement: The approach to Animality / Tierlichkeit.

What all works so völkisch …

For a good impression of what “völkischness” comprises historically, how it developed and how it functions, see: Miriam Yegane Arani: NS racism as a visual ideology > Tierautonomie, Jg. 7 (2020), Heft 2 > https://simorgh.de/tierautonomie/JG7_2020_2.pdf > https://d-nb.info/1222998904/34 > https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2020120814102757831194

Völkisch approaches to animal issues

Animality and the dead end of völkisch arrogance: For decades they have been showing you the realities of everyday animal objectificating violence, only to suggest we should all unequivocally be content with some un-political and un-enlightened demands.

The völkisch animal rights scene, which is quite flexible in terms of foreign policy (while it is not very interested in difficult animal rights activism in repressive states, which obviously does not always work as one is used to, within ones limited horizon of national and Western/Eurocentric experiences) … you can recognize the völkische animal rights scene by the way they communicate animal rights issues:

With them an „animal“ is simply an „animal“, to them it is about nothing more than quite simple black and white dichotomies, with half-answered answers to half-questions – they always seek their basis on the still common restrictive ideas about animality, they act solely as a crowd and not as thinking individuals, they appear merely as a self-contained, especially in terms of content potentially mobbing crowd.

The scene is in its mental uniformity so homogeneous and so anti-pluralistic as hardly any other, and makes the topic a banal question of ethical finesse but not of political substantiality:

For decades they have been demonstrating to you the realities of cruel everyday speciesism / animal objectification, only to come forth with the most ridiculously un-political and un-enlightened demands.

No rethinking, but donating, pulling on the same hollow string, and self-righteously treading water. And they think exactly that would only and exclusively serve „the cause“. Everything else is considered harmful.

—

• Völkisch is neither a thing of the past nor a thing that concerns only those who explicitly pose as völkisch-thinking people.
• Völkisch behavior and thinking is observable on the basis of criteria which were valid, recognizable, and observable from the very beginning of this ethnocentrically functioning self-image.

It behaves in the same way as „whiteness“ does, with the only difference that here a local ethnic group from the German-speaking area modulates itself delimitatively and arrogantly, like a subclass to the larger racist „concept“ of the white North-West European and its cultural expansion at the expense of other peoples and other cultural forms/circles.

Many think that since it is only a „local“ phenomenon of blatant ethnocentrism and the tendency to ethnohomogeneous conceptions, and since those concerned can act in a sub-statement mode (by virtue of the circumstantial settings), because of the low level of international attention, völkisch thinking, in the form it easily took hold in the Third Reich, no longer exists.

Also because of the overlapping interests of international majority societies, the Völkischsein today usually falls under the table as a perceived „normal racism“ … .

The Völkischsein adapts to the time in a conditional way. In the age of the Anthropocene, with the constant self-imagination of European moral-ethical intellectual excellence, no important moral issue that is being argued about, especially one involving nothing less than human supremacy over the non-human world, would be allowed to pass without the völkisch-collective bringing in their claim to definitional sovereignty.

Addendum:

Perhaps some cannot comprehend this point of view and find it aberrant. We have to live with it, and we ourselves are not enthusiastic about our observations collected over the years about strategies and the lack of substantial developments in content of many clusters in the German-speaking space in D/A/CH that dedicates itself to ‚the animal question‘. In fact, we definitely ask ourselves:

1. How does the narrowness of content in the view of animality and animal issues come about, where does the typical, standardized basic way of thinking about animals come from?
2. Where does the lack of diversity in the discussion of topics come from? Many authors can write about topics, yet if the approaches stay constantly narrowly similar, while at the same time other approaches do exist in the broader international context, we ask ourselves why and what, above all, is consciously and knowingly contentwise left out here in helpful as much more differentiated viewing points.

We can only explain this through a cultural, self-chosen narrow-mindedness, which we perceive as questionable and as problematic. Here even pseudo-diversity will not bring about a change in the fixed cultural and political navigation mechanisms.

Addition 2:

Alone the continuous loop: „Are we allowed to kill animals?“ shows a perspectivical arrogance towards the subject, and a presupposition of an expected homogeneity among humans. We obviously do know that we ourselves and many people find Theriocide wrong (this answer is not even considered in the question), but apart from that, an answer in a case of an ethical error cannot be the question whether we „all“ collectively „get it“ or not, when we should in reality be able to name injustice, even if the „we“ in our society has not reached this point and perhaps will not reach it for a foreseeable future.

Or to criticize the „grievance within the grievance“ as a partial evil, but to neglect (without recourse to all human evils which are logically tied to animal objectification) to bring the fundamental debate to the forefront, yet to accept in the meantime, without much complaint, that the issues that would evolve around serious justice towards animals are treated as secondary by other movements without any ethical embarrassment at all on those groups/subjects behalf?

The spirit of complicity in combination with the communally upheld moral imperatives is simply irritating on such a level.

Moreover, at some other instance „the grievance in the grievance“-situation is again being completely ignored or considered to be only a relative problem, just as how it seems politically to be the most convenient.

—

We are not gonna argue how limited a few Animal Welfare regulations are in the setting of a machinery (any contemporary society) that up till today pretends to have never even heard of Animal Rights, or assumes the limited demands to be rightly sufficient for Nonhumans.

The most tragic thing being that such regulations tend to prolong the ignorance towards the basic issues. If we bring the single violent settings on the table we simultaneously have to be demanding full justice, with all consequences, otherwise a paradigm shift is not gonna be initiateable.

29