Prof Susan Neiman - Lecture 3: Freedom Fighter or Terrorist? John Brown and the American Civil War

The focus of this lecture, the third in this Gifford series, is on John Brown and it presented an overview of his life and actions and argued why he should be seen as a hero. Brown was born in 1800 in Connecticut and was an abolitionist who was hung in 1859.

[terrencebushell]

Thanks for the lecture I am fascinated by John Brown! There can be no cause more just to fight and die for than to end slavery. John Brown knew it was wrong with every fibre of his body and fought his whole life for the cause... a true hero...

[alanaadams]

What has Brown got to do with being vegan and animal cruelty?

[victoriousvegan]

“There are times, and these not infrequent, when tears come to my eyes when I see, or read, or hear of the wretched plight of animals in the hands of humans. Their pain, their suffering, their loneliness, their innocence, their death. Anger. Rage. Pity. Sorrow. Disgust. The whole creation groans under the weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute, powerless creatures. It is our hearts, not just our heads, that call for an end to it all, that demand of us that we overcome, for them, the habits and forces behind their systematic oppression. All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realization of this third stage, adoption, that requires both our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands. God grant we are equal to the task.”

Tom Regan

[victoriousvegan]

“Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”

Albert Einstein

[victoriousvegan]

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That’s the essence of inhumanity.”

George Bernard Shaw

[victoriousvegan]

“In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.”

Ruth Harrison

[victoriousvegan]

“I ask this court: If it is NOT a crime to torture, enslave and murder animals, then how can it be a crime to free tortured, enslaved and soon-to-be-murdered animals?”

Gary Yourofsky

[victoriousvegan]

“In the midst of our high-tech, ostentatious, hedonistic lifestyle, among the dazzling monuments to history, art, religion, and commerce, there are the black boxes. These are the biomedical research laboratories, factory farms, and slaughterhouses – faceless compounds where society conducts its dirty business of abusing and killing innocent, feeling beings. These are our Dachaus, our Buchenwalds, our Birkenaus. Like the good German burghers, we have a fair idea of what goes on there, but we don’t want any reality checks.”

Dr. Alex Hershaft, Warsaw Ghetto survivor

[victoriousvegan]

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”

John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel Award Winner in Literature

[victoriousvegan]

“When I see cages crammed with chickens from battery farms thrown on trucks like bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced onto trains leaving for the death camps). When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates.”

Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

[victoriousvegan]

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Man­kind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”

Milan Kundera

“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”

William Ralph Inge

[victoriousvegan]

“I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.”

Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Dachau concentration camp survivor

[victoriousvegan]

“Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won’t be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn’t know.”

Dr. Helmut Kaplan, an Austrian writer and Philosopher

[victoriousvegan]

“What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world – about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer – a member of a family perished in the Holocaust and a Nobel Prize winner

[victoriousvegan]

“I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.
We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.”

John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel Award Winner in Literature

[victoriousvegan]

“ ‘Never again’ is not about what others shouldn’t do to us. It’s about what we shouldn’t do to others. ‘Never again’ means that we must never again perpetrate mass atrocities against other living beings. That we must never again raise animals for food or any other form of exploitation.”

Dr. Alex Hershaft, Warsaw Ghetto survivor

[victoriousvegan]

“Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is — whether its victim is human or animal — we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”

Rachel Carson

[victoriousvegan]

“Holocaust victims WERE treated like animals, and so logically we can conclude that animals are treated like Holocaust victims.”

Matt Prescott

[victoriousvegan]

“There are many noteworthy examples of ordinary evil in every culture and country around the globe, but in terms of preventable evil I am hard pressed to find any examples that approach those systematically perpetrated by humans against the members of other species.”

Lawrence Pope

[victoriousvegan]

“If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.”

Paul Watson