We are entering a new decade. How will we be viewed come the new Century?

When I was at school, I often wondered how I would have behaved in the different periods of history I was learning about. Had I been born in Germany a century previously, would I have joined the Schutzstaffel, or resisted the Nazi regime? What about being born in 19^th Century America; would I have fought for the slaves’ freedom, or accepted the system I was born in?

How would this picture change if all of my friends joined the Nazi party, or if my family owned slaves? How would I behave then?

I believe that these thoughts are very common, and it is easy to think that if we were to simply have had the chance, we would have fought alongside Hans Scholl and Sojourner Truth. With our 21^st Century mindset, the crimes committed by the Nazis and the slave-owners are so clearly abhorrent that many of us believe we would have been compelled to act, even if it meant risking our lives.

If this is the case, that the vast majority of people are fundamentally decent and would resist these gross violations of nature, then how do we explain the Nazis, or the slave trade, or Pol Pot’s government? When peering through the lens of history, this can be a very difficult question to understand and it is no surprise that Nazi Germany is by far the most discussed topic in literature in modern history. But in examining the crimes of the past and contemplating how we would have behaved, we are ignoring a vital point that helps us to understand this issue. It is easy to comment on how we would have changed the crimes of the past, but what are we doing to change the crimes of today?

“What will our descendants think of us in the year 2220?”

I believe that one of the key explanators for this puzzle is that evil is far easier to recognise in retrospect. When you exist within a system of slavery, you are surrounded by it and it is such a quotidian feature of contemporary life, it can be extremely difficult to recognise and challenge it. It requires a truly introspective person to take a step back and examine their life and society with a critical eye, evaluating not just the behaviour of others but their own behaviour as well. Now that slavery has been abolished, it appears obvious that it was a vile abuse of power and a disgraceful blot against the integrity of the human race. But very few people at the time saw it as such.

The important question from this is – how will our society be viewed in history? Are we going to fall into the same trap of believing that the way we live our lives is just and moral, or do we have the bravery to question some of the most fundamental parts of our lives, and truly consider whether we are stumbling through another of humanity’s worst crimes? What will our descendants think of us in the year 2220?

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Common themes in the crimes of history

Without having an understanding of common themes in the atrocities of the past, it can be difficult to recognise the atrocities of the present. We are lucky enough to live in a time with unrivalled access to history, both modern and ancient, and as such we can recognise some recurring trends in the darker side of humanity. This is by no means an exhaustive or exclusive list, but it provides a framework through which we can evaluate our society.

The first, and arguably most important, commonality in the crimes of humanity is the exploitation of power structures; often artificially created by the powerful to exploit the ‘other’. Whether this is the little-known Papua New Guinean slave trade perpetrated by white Australians, the confinement of women to domestic servitude, or the Stalinist Gulags filled with political enemies, power structures are abused by those at the top at the expense of the vulnerable. While these examples provide some evidence of the lines upon which power structures can be drawn, there are a plethora of other structures that exist – many of which are barely visible to the naked eye.

The second feature, which is used to justify these power structures, is the forced grouping together of specific groups at the expense of their individuality. Native Americans were considered homogeneous and inferior by the colonial invaders, and it does not take a great deal of imagination to picture how this could extend to an inter-species form of grouping and stratifying. Just as the colonists had little regard for the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, we would be fools to imagine galactic colonists being more tolerant. While this article is not going to discuss this issue any further (I am by no means qualified to discuss intergalactic morality), it is important to note that this artificial grouping of individuals is not necessarily confined to inter-human relations.

Finally, tying these two points together, the groups that are subordinated in power structures are systemically abused and exploited for private gain. They are reduced to a mere commodity (think African men being auctioned off to the highest bidder) and are thus stripped of the dignity of even being considered a living creature. Their desire for life, to avoid pain and to experience pleasure, is ignored in the pursuit of profit or convenience. For those of you who find this a chilling thought, you are having the correct response.

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So what about today?

Now to the big question – is this relevant to modern Western society? I’m sure many of you may be slightly bemused at this point. The slaves have been emancipated, women are (legally) equal to men, and liberal democracy has been established across the Western world. We have fought all the battles left to fight, surely?

But once again we are failing to take a step outside of the structures we exist within. After utilising power structures to exploit humanity en-masse throughout history, we continue the exploitation through another sphere – animal agriculture.

For many people reading this, I’m sure the first response will be to scoff and announce indignantly that animals don’t count. Our focus should be on the wellbeing of human beings, not the animals. Just as our focus should be on the white man, not the black man. Or men, not women.

Humans may be the most intelligent species in the world, but we are by no means the only ones to feel pain, the only ones to feel love, or the only ones to seek life. Anybody with a dog can testify that other species are capable of a wide range of emotional states, including loneliness, fear and pain. And it would be foolish to think that this is only the case for dogs, or other domesticated animals.

When a cow gives birth to a calf, she releases the hormone oxytocin; the very same hormone released in human females when they give birth to a baby. Except in a dairy farm, once the cow has given birth (due to being forcibly impregnated to make her lactate), this baby is then ripped from her so that humans can drink the milk that has been chemically designed to raise her calf. Once she has finished lactating, she is then put through the entire ordeal again so that we can drink cow’s milk instead of oat milk in our coffee. This process continues until she eventually collapses from exhaustion after 5 years (cows in the wild can live to 20 years), when she is then taken to a slaughter-house and butchered so that we can eat her flesh. This is the reality of life for the 264 million dairy cows alive today.

The second objection which people will doubtless be raising is that the vile scenes of torture and abuse aren’t widespread – they are confined to a tiny minority of farms, usually in foreign countries, which are not representative of farming in the UK or in ‘civil’ Western countries. This is, sadly, a fallacy. According to section S6.1 of the RSPCA’s guide to humane slaughter of pigs, murder by ‘inert gasses’ or ‘exposure to carbon dioxide until death ensues, followed by bleeding’ is acceptable practice. These are literally gas chambers, set up for the systemic massacre of a species right here in the UK. I’m sure I do not need to make the historical parallels explicit.

The human race has put itself at the top of a power structure, with every other species on earth subordinate to us. We have stripped them of their individuality, and are exploiting them in a grotesque manner so that we can eat our way to diabetes because their flesh tastes nice. There is no dietary need for meat (the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the biggest society of dieticians in the world, confirmed that a vegan diet is appropriate for all stages of life), and thus the abuse of animals can only be viewed as gross exploitation for selfish, private gain.

It can be extremely challenging to recognise our own flaws, and even harder to do something about it. This is why the crimes that we now recognise throughout history were allowed to continue – the vast majority of people simply did not realise the consequences of their every-day behaviour. In the words of Hannah Arendt, this ‘banality of evil’ is often the primary driver of horrific crimes. Evil does not necessarily require vicious dictators or murdering psychopaths, but rather normal people being blind to the true consequences of their actions. So for everyone who believes they would have stood up to the Nazis, fought against slavery and marched alongside the Pankhursts – this is the fight of our generation. We need to stop exploiting animals for their milk, flesh, and skin. This is the crime that is occurring beneath our eyes, and this is our chance to do something about it.