Playing billard with Nazis about Animality
Just a short simple note:
The Austrian activist Martin Balluch says the Christian sect “Universelles Lebens” need protection as a religious minority and they should not be put into the same category as Neo-Nazis:
Screenshot: 17.01.2023
Balluch criticizes another activist, Colin Goldner, who 2007 compares the named sect with neo-nazis, see > https://web.archive.org/web/20170421141105/http://alfred.blogsport.de/texte/der-braune-rand-der-tierrechtsbewegung/ ; https://simorgh.de/sprechen/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Der-braune-Rand-der-Tierrechtsbewegung-Colin-Goldner-alfred__-web.archive.org_.pdf.
Yet my critique is:
Apples with Apples, Pears with Pears.
If both activist’s approaches were a bit more comprehensive, they’d understand that:
“The relegation of ‘the main thing is being for the animals’ into the corner, to which one assigns this title, distracts from the fact that the formulation ‘mainly for the animals’ (a freely floating ‘inner trend’ of certain segments of groups dealing with animal topics) actually only represents a superficial consideration of the question.” page 20 > Edition Farangis: Animal Autonomy E-Reader Jahrgang 4, Nr. 1 Januar 2023, https://farangis.de/reader/edition_farangis_animal_autonomy_reader_2023_1.pdf
If they’d be a bit informed about the thesis also by some (e.g. VOC/POC/decolonial) other authors they’d not automatically let any political field, especially neonaziism or far right conservativism, hijack animal related topics, as if they could just claim a field. Claiming the field is the problem, writing weak slogans. Why take it out on the independent matter? They are acting like they want to shut a discourse down, by making an entire ethical field a cheap playground for any usual “human chauvisisn”, etc.
An appropriation of a topic doesn’t create some kind of “ownership”. That they think this can be done with animal issues, reveals a problematic stance towards animality really.
I cut this shot because it’s important yet tiresome, and I will probably come back to the issues over and over again anyway, since it’s a prevalent inner social discourse problem in the German speaking countries.
We believe they have a hard time letting go their old fashioned concepts of might, and how to envisage what they consider to be a “definitory might“, they can either apply of fight about.