Bad actors
If you want to won political authority and be obeyed it is important to make people believe that you are a good person. With that disguise obedience can be more easily claimed: you must obey me because I order the good, the right. Congressmen, senators and political bosses use their position and dictate actions, but justify them by claim that they are of a moral nature: as if those decisions promoted personal improvement, or as if the people became good for having obey that decision.
We must know that the photos that they permit to be taken as those that are not allowed, the people who visit and the people who stop visiting, the political programs they announce or dismiss, or any action who the political actor decide to do, they decide to do it because it helps them to ascend from one positions to another from which that can exercise greater power and influence: from governor to president, from local deputy to federal deputy. To justify this way of life they make their actions shine as if they somehow made them better people. The disguise of good is not used alone. It must be accompanied by the disguise of “bad person” that they eagerly impose on their rivals. They are good, they say, so their rivals and competitors are bad. It is as important to accuse someone of being bad as to be able to pass as good person.
The concern for the so-called “animal rights” are an efficient way of be characterized like a good person.
Hitler adored animals. In intimate conversations and in ostentatious public statements he liked to repeat that “his Blondie –his dog- was more intelligent than many humans”. In his private diaries Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, declared that one razon for that Hitler hated the Jewish and Christian religions is because they give more value to human beings than to animals. What Hitler ostensible show for animals was presented by the Nazis as proof of the moral goodness of the Nazis. As opposed to the Christians and Jews, who were “cruel” because they mistreated the animals. The Nazis were the “good guys”, and those were the “bad guys”.
Nazi Germany was at the forefront of the so-called “animal rights” (1). In 1927, Nazi deputies presented an initiative against animal cruelty: they demanded to suspend the kosher laws (the ceremonial way in which Jews sacrifice animals) for being “cruel”. In 1931, they proposed to eliminate vivisection. 1933 was a wonderful year for “animal rights.” Just Hitler was appointed Chancellor that year they ordered that no animal could be slaughtered without first anesthetizing it. In August they ordered the definitive elimination of vivisection in German territory. Herman Göring, then prime minister of Prussia, announced “the end of the torture and suffering of animal experimentation,” and declared that “those who treat animals as property,” would be sent to concentration camps. “ In a radio address broadcast nationally, he exclaimed: “The prohibition of any form of vivisection is not only a necessary part of the law to protect animals and how to show sympathy for their pain, but it must also be a law for the same humanity … Therefore, I announce the immediate prohibition and punishment of vivisection in Prussia. Until the forms of punishment for that crime are announced, anyone who commits it will be sent to the concentration camps”. The same is now demanded by those who demand the closure of slaughterhouses and bull rings.
Göring also forbade horseshoeing and boiling crabs and lobsters. A German fisherman was to give his bones to a concentration camp for committing that fault.
In November 1933 Nazi Germany voted the Reichstierschutzgesetz: Reich Act for the Protection of Animals. It prohibited the use of animals in films if they caused any kind of damage. The two main interior ministers or Ministerialräte, Clemens Giese and Waldemar Kahler were responsible for implementing the Reich Act for the Protection of Animals. Kahler commented on the Act that “animals should be protected by themselves” and not as part of any process or work, that animals are “an object of protection that goes far beyond the law until now”.
In 1934, the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Employment decreed that primary school children be indoctrinated in animal rights. Of course: if you disguises like as good person, you give yourself the right to educate young people. If you manage to make believe that you act for good, you give yourself the right to impose “values”, to declare that you educate the youngest in “values”.
To cause or not to cause pain to an animal does not say anything about the moral quality of a person. You can, like Hitler or Göring, order kill millions of people and be happy about that, and you can suffer because someone hits a dog. Considering animal suffering does not make you a better person. An animalist politician would save a dog or a cat instead of saving a child, and it would feel good with himself: he claims that both lives are worth the same, so, if unfortunately he has not been able to save both, the one he has rescued is as valuable as the other. Thats why feeling good with yourself is moraly vacuum. Even more: he would claim more power for himself, because that way he could save more lives.
When politicians play to disguise themselves as people of moral excelence they become a danger to society. When the authorities claim have moral responsibilities they become a danger to society. If they achieve to make us believe that they are “good”, what they order becomes a moral duty. Disobeying what they command becomes an evil: as they command good, and we do not obey, then we are bad. And the punishment is not given only for having broken the law: it is punished for sinning. The animalist policeman save the dog, not the child the child, then affirm and assure that it has done well, and that therefore we have no reason to criticize you. If somebody criticize them, is because that person are bad.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany
