Nationalism & the mere concept of "Good People". (vegan / vegans / veganism)
23 May 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey guys this is a spontaneous video at
several points in this video I am going to make reflections that are directly relevant to veganism and the politics we have to think about in relation to ecology etc these days but the core issue what I'm talking about here this is drawing on and reflecting on a little bit more broadly my own life experience political and otherwise open with an anecdote I had a boss when I was working in Thailand and he was born and raised in Germany and he was a young child during the Nazi period but he had many memories of the period in the immediate aftermath of World War two when the country was being rebuilt and when many people include his including his own parents were looking back on their recent memories of what the Nazi period had been now his mother he said to me was not an intelligent woman she was sort of a bumpkin from a small town who really did not understand what the Nazi Party was when she became a member so she was among the many millions of people who joined partly out of ignorance and the truth of that will be shown in the rest of this anecdote one day she read a story in the newspaper and it's interesting that this was in a German newspaper in Nazi Germany during the Nazi period a story responding to claims made by some foreign countries that the Holocaust was happening of course it wasn't called the Holocaust yet but that there were accusations that the Germans were engaged in mass murder of Jews various other ethnic minorities and political enemies of the state of course anyone that Nazis wanted to kill in death camps labor camps etc she went completely guilelessly she went to a public meeting of the Nazi Party in her town as she was a member and she held up this article she clipped out of the newspaper and said passionately that she knew this wasn't true that she knew the Holocaust couldn't because um our people wouldn't do this she said she made the claim that she didn't believe her fellow party members or her fellow countrymen would do this because she felt that they were good people that we were good people and now the reaction of this is also very German culturally you kind of have to live in Germany to to picture this but everyone in the room was silent her fellow audience members because she was speaking from the audience and also the people on the stage who were in charge of the meeting or what have you they all sort of rumpled up their faces you know and looked at her with derision as if to say you must be an idiot but the response was simply this kind of scolding severe silence and she got the message not only was the Holocaust actually happening but everyone in that room was aware it was happening now this is an interesting anecdote in many ways it challenges the myth that nobody knew you know many people pretended they had no idea what's going on and some I mean hey some people had no idea but a lot of people did know what was going on um but it also punctures the myth that there was no way to show defiance because she responded to that happening at that meeting by quitting the Nazi Party very publicly and angrily and quitting for the reason that she felt the Holocaust was immoral that killing people in this way of this kind of political activity was and I said when she wasn't arrested and she wasn't punished she carried on being a housewife and raising the young child who would later become my boss and who would tell me this story this delusion are people good people who are the good people and the notion that good people don't do bad things and that therefore what you're telling me must be wrong or what I read in the newspaper what must be wrong or maybe that's happening in another country but it's not happening here these are really powerful delusions that motivate an animate in life and they come up in connection to veganism under many headings they definitely come up in connection to veganism you know when you meet people who think who really believe oh yes in China the fur industry does these cruel and terrible things to animals but we would never do that in Sweden we would never do that in Norway or Finland you know I don't know in this country people treat animals with respect unlike Russia right next door or China far away I grew up with one of the most absurd of these nationalistic distinctions being foisted on me my parents were of the generation who protested against the Vietnam War and their view of the world and their view of the United States of America was very much shaped by the historical experience of the Vietnam War and I can remember I mean they they said casually with with no source I mean they'd never read the setting where I know whatever made the claim that somehow the terrible things about the meat industry would be true in the United States but not in Canada that somehow Canada's meat industry was morally blessed um in some fundamental way that our people wouldn't do this and our governments wouldn't do this right but by the way the the notion that Canada didn't get any blood on its hands in Vietnam is also false but that's that that's a story for another time I remember there was one day a very good news story I remember it being on the radio on our government controlled radio CBC radio this was the government criticizing itself in reality and they went out and and interviewed workers in slaughterhouses as well as interviewing government ministers and trade experts because the question was not the animal rights but had to do with standards of Hygiene and international trade and economic factors it was many other facets of the meat industry being examined not the animal rights but the animal rights came up because the actual conditions of slaughter were part of the story and everyone from the kind of you know bureaucrat experts down to the guys who actually work with guys who drive the trucks I remember they interviewed some of the guys who drive the trucks because they knew the conditions inside the buildings they were collect the various buildings they were collecting the meat from very saw houses everyone at every level confirmed that the conditions in Canada were much worse than the United States at that's high that in the United States there were some standards being enforced for everything from hygiene to you know the rapid nests with which animals were killed or what-have-you and that in Canada situation was much worse now these things can change a lot within ten years they can change even more in 20 years I have no reason to think they've changed but for me as a kid what made the biggest impression was that when I reported this to my mother I said you know like what you've been telling me is not true and you know what people say in general is not true our slaughterhouse conditions our meatpacking conditions in Canada are not better than the United States they're actually much worse and my mother responded with absolute denial and again it's this notion the same notion I just quoted from the history of Germany our people wouldn't do this our nation wouldn't do this you know or wanting to believe that our people are good people and that good people don't do bad things this came up in the long long interview I did with Zarya very briefly I mentioned the problem of nationalism it's come up in a couple of my videos in the books of Song of Ice and Fire it's a fictional book series that's now a famous TV show called Game of Thrones there's a dialogue at one point where someone reflects I'm paraphrasing friendly but it points out something this isn't presented as terrifying but it's just presented as an aspect of human nature that is terrifying it comments on the type of men engaged in atrocities during war during the wars their happiness books and so you know these are the type of guys these guys in this unit the army once every couple of years there will be a war and they'll rape and pillage and torture and burn down villages and you know fight knife to knife blade to blade and then the war will end and they'll go home and wash their hands and take care of their wives and children and work in a mill or on a farm and become completely normal and indistinguishable from the rest of the population now those books the the reason why they're interested me is exactly this type of very ashen reflection on human nature war or politics and morality which is a small percentage of the text there are very very long books but you get those moments every so often that really resonate with me I think resonate with other people who have a sort of political science background the horrors of war are made more profound by the fact that the people who commit those atrocities are mostly not different from you and I they mostly are normal people or to put it another way if they're given the opportunity to be normal people they will be even if they're abnormal even if there's somewhat terrible people and one of the most extreme examples Anu of that the publisher I used to work in the publishing industry I was an editor of nonfiction books academic books but non fact history politics stuff my publisher that employed me in in Thailand they had they had a first-person account from one of the torture houses in Cambodia under communism this is one of the buildings where people were arrested tortured and of course executed interrogated and so on but basically everyone was killed nobody was ever released as innocent I don't I don't think there are any exceptions but anyway this was a book written it was based on interviews with a guy who had survived in in this within this facility now after the war was over this is a famous facility famous death camp where people were executed huge numbers the the guy who wrote this book he became an employee of the death camp when it was turned into a museum it was turned into a memorial to record this history and to provide a place of mourning people to go to and there weren't that many people carrying out the executions there was one guy who was the main torturer an executor on the you know other people killed people in smaller numbers but there one guy who really did the bulk of the killing and there were no trials there was no justice there were at the end of the war people just stopped fighting and this guy the main executor the main torturer who had been a you know terror and suffering and death to so many people you know he came to visit the museum as a normal guy and the main executive the guy who was in charge and gave the orders he did eventually decades later go on trial but so many decades had passed between the atrocities and the trial that he was able to indicate that as soon as the war was over he went back to living like a normal guy he actually did some charity work to but you know the notion the two things that first there's the notion of our people then there's the notion of good people and then the third step is the delusion that good people don't do bad things and on the contrary good people do bad things and bad people do good things and life is full of those kinds of contradictions and of course if you have the detachment or if you have the nihilism you can take the next next step of saying there really is no distinction between our people and other people there are just people now I am NOT saying this because I don't believe in personal accountability I think I mean I raised this again in the conversation with Zarya but that that part of conversation go anywhere I think it's actually really interesting to to ask the question of should people be morally accountable for killing animals whether it's participating in vivisection experiments that are proven to be immoral and cruel like some of these really examples or killing animals for leather or what have you I think there is a really interesting question about actually putting people on trial and at the end of you know the Cambodian genocide one of the many great failings I feel was exactly that there there were no trials there was no accountability huge number of people died in combat but for people who had blood on their hands who didn't die in combat um a lot of them went on to positions of privilege in the the new order that was established brokered by the United States China and other other foreign partners and of course above all Vietnam Vietnam controlled the destiny of Cambodia in many ways for many years if you've been playing a drinking game of having a shot of vodka every time I mention Cambodia you're now you're now thoroughly drunk so the other big topic I wanted to link this to I had a conversation with Jenny who is one of my subscribers on on patreon here there is in fact more than one Jenny already on my mind subscribes so don't assume it's the right Jenny because we have a few Jenny's already but you know Jenny shared a link to one of my recent videos she shared a link I think via Facebook doesn't matter she shared a link to my video that was discussing the problem of palm oil and vegan misconceptions about vegan hysteria about palm oil farming in particular and she got an extreme reaction from a guy who is living in Bangkok Thailand a white man who works for the United Nations so he's very much a foreigner and I've encountered this many many times in humanitarian work in life abroad in life as an expatriate said etcetera what this guy was doing fundamentally is just as stupid as the attitude of the woman at that meeting of the Nazi Party in World War two or her attitude when she arrived at the meeting she left that meeting a little bit wiser which is that he was stuck in and he was absolutely adamant that it's impossible that these people do this and he backed this up with and this is always misleading anecdotal evidence you know from isolated experience he's visited a farm he's visited a durian farm he's you know I'm I myself as a child I've visited a you know a sheep farm I've visited a goat farm and yeah it looks beautiful there are there are goats wandering on the hillside you can't see how perverse it is how violent it is how terrible it is by just looking at that snapshot of goats wandering in a field and you can't even understand how unnatural it is without comparing it to conditions in the wild now our most notorious for raising this when challenging pet ownership of saying no no look at how feral dogs live look at how wild dogs live and now question again the morality of what you're doing with with dog ownership but even with meat agriculture or with raising animals for milk or leather when you look at those goats standing in a in a grassy field on the side of a mountain it may look beautiful and they look peaceful peaceful is a word that springs to mind when you walk out and see that the goats are all female where are the male's the goats are all the same age right there are no elderly goats they don't have a normal pack formation have you ever seen how goats really live in the wild where there are old and young and male and female and the male's compete for dominance and they have predators and cetera et cetera you know actually what you're looking at just by the absence of the males already is profoundly distorted and as with chickens and everything else that these questions are killing all the mails or castrating the males raising them for me to what-have-you but there are these various ways in which human beings have already shaped the whole scenario even if you're just looking at that snapshot and the step beyond that as I've already said in one video is of not looking at the snapshot not looking at one moment in time but looking at the whole life cycle of saying ok this is a moment in a cycle that includes slaughter but of course it also includes breeding and it includes feeding includes the question of where does that food come from you know now I know talk to people already know this stuff but I'm drawing attention to the fact that you know there's a different type of thinking involved for a vegan seeing the world in those terms of refusing to buy into the peaceful snapshot you know a snapshot of nature or of a national industry and for some countries that vision you know the goats on the hill is a source of national pride definitely for Spain you know in the Pyrenees lost piranhas and you know for for Switzerland for many countries that you know the mountainside agriculture probably northern Italy - that's actually a source of pride they see that as beautiful they see that as part of their national glory or heritage or what-have-you and understandably you know if it's just a snapshot if it's just a postcard it looks beautiful but I think veganism in principle is in part a refusal to buy the postcard and insistence and moving beyond the postcard but nationalism itself is a distraction the notion these are our people these are good people good people do do don't do bad things and it's sickening to me but this guy in Bangkok whom Jenny was talking to just as a foreign expert I mean he had obviously bought in so deeply to this mindfuck for a lack of a better word part in my course language that he didn't want to accept you you know sort of violently refused to accept the very obviously self obviously true things self-evidently true things that I say about what goes on in a durian farm and on many other types of fruit farms I just mentioned now in Southeast Asia you know you may read things referring to that they have to kill like squirrels with a with a rifle the animals of a squirrel is not quite accurate there are animals there that are that are sometimes called raccoons that are not reckons they're animals called a civet cats there are a lot of things besides I mean I mentioned monkeys and pigs there were all kinds of animals that come to eat fruit on farm and that indeed there's a man with a rifle to kill those animals and of course you know there are other methods of putting up nets and putting out poison there are all kinds of ways that people are killing animals every day and again you know I wish I could say I don't understand how people convince themselves this can't possibly be true even though it's so logical it's so obvious it's self-evident but I know exactly how they convince themselves on the one hand it's these factors I've described its kind of phony nationalism and in the other hand it's having been there it's having seen the postcard of course you can visit a farm you visit a fruit farm for five minutes say oh it's beautiful and leave but just as I was describing moving beyond the postcard with understanding you know whether it's cattle or goats the goats in the side of the mountain there's also moving beyond the static image the postcard image of the fruit hanging on the tree to seeing a whole cycle which includes these of pesticides and everything else now some vegans don't want to do that because some vegans want to believe fruit agriculture is perfectly moral or green agriculture is perfectly moral whereas meat agriculture is totally evil I got one email from someone who claimed to have a degree in the sciences of some kind and said they didn't believe grain farming killed anything it was I don't know where he got you to plumber um and I remember I didn't feel like writing a long email back I just sent a link to the Wikipedia entry for you know groundhogs in Saskatchewan it's a specific species Richardson's ground squirrel we call them groundhogs prairie dogs the names we use are inaccurate and English is scientifically inaccurate via the Wikipedia article dissection forum pest control for the speech you know there is a course a tremendous culture and Industry of human beings killing these animals so that we can get grown do you think you think anything in nature resembles a modern wheat farm you think anything in the jungle resembles an orchard producing Makos thank we I digress um I've encountered this kind of mentality among white Western people in Southeast Asia again and again what they're wanting to buy in there was an Italian guy who I just met I met him once alone and then met him with his wife and kid when I was doing humanitarian work in northwestern Laos and I knew the statistics off the top of my head at that time it was both my job and my interest but I bumped into this guy and he had done some volunteer work for two weeks or something and then had gone back to Italy and come back on vacation with his wife and he said to me with total arrogant self-confidence nobody here is poor nobody here is starving that's all nonsense made up by Western governments made nonsense made about Western governments to justify foreign intervention this is kind of left-wing conspiracy thinking and he you know he was a left-wing [ __ ] this is just an excuse for you know for people like me to come and do charity work yeah right we're making up excuses to go live in that bamboo hut huh um and he said the people here are you know they have no problem with poverty or starvation because they can go out in the woods and gather food anytime they can feed themselves by just wandering in the forest sort of Hill glamorized image of what hunting and gathering is like and I just said to him offhand I need the exact percentage of the time I said something like in this province 40% of people are dependent on foreign donated food and otherwise they would starve or flee you know now 40 percent is not the number but I knew the percent of time and it was a very high percentage like that for that province it's not for the whole country it's for that that little area and that was an area that was devastated in the war with the Americans blah blah blah there are historical reasons as to why it was so so desperate and again in reality if they weren't getting that food donated to them they wouldn't starve they would migrate they would just go somewhere else where they could find a job and find food which I'm not saying is a good thing I'm just saying this the reality they wouldn't sit in one place and starve to death they would walk relatively short distance I have probably run away to Thailand and you know it work as illegal migrants in Thailand if that kind of assistance stopped if people like me working working with the agency if the agency I worked with stopped handing them sacks of rice that you know had a stamp on them saying you know gift of Finland with the UN logo on it or whatever um anyway I remember this guy the arrogance was so great and his sense of nationalism his sense of pride and he's not lotion he's not from that country he's Italian but his sense of you know these are good people you know that somehow I was taking away the the pride of these people by being realistic was it was it was absurd and and deeply offensive to me and I remember how mocking and scornful he was and again what I was saying was so inherently plausible I said to him look I understand you've witnessed people walking around in the forest gathering food which can be very impressive if you go with indigenous tribal people who know how to gather food out of the forest you walk around the jungle with tribal people in order to do that they walk around and they see something and dig up the roots and pull it out wow it makes a big impression on you I said but that kind of gathering of food it can feed a tribe of five people a tribe of thirty people maximum and those groups the mountain top groups they lived in small small groups of people you know each mountain top at just a couple people with with some of those groups said that that can't feed 10,000 people it's not a staple of the diet for tens of thousands of people that's not the way this is not comparable to like the green industry in Canada filling up huge silos and trucks with enormous of quantities of grain that feed millions of people in the cities and the other thing I said to him was and you know you must realize the jungle is all being cut down as tragic but you would see it you know I remember okay one entity leads to another but I remember there was one village I arrived in to do humanitarian work and had a peculiar sort of Vista because it was actually machette on a sort of plateau at the top of a mountain it's not quite worth sure but you go up a mountain and there's a flat area at the top of the mound you go down so you would see around in a in a peculiar way and I remember the first day I walked to work there I walked and you could see the stark difference there was a line on the horizon where the deforestation was you know like so you know there's forest or jungle what everyone say and there's a line and the ground is just bare you know is it barren and I thought to myself you know you do a lot of thing you do stuff when you're the only person who speaks English in the village because otherwise I was speaking just in lotion all day every day you do a lot of thinking yourself you make an art of having a conversation with yourself because nobody else speaks English but I've thought to myself and chuckled oh haha I bet you can see that line move you know every few days you know you thought that and went to work and a couple days later I went to work again and the line had moved and I felt emotionally devastated you know I felt terrible looking at that I thought oh my god you know I was just joking with myself but it's literally true you know that's the pace of deforestation here within a couple of days you can see the last of the jungle being erased anyway and those people those indigenous people who know how to hunt and know how to gather herbs and you know know how to dig up roots out of the earth to try to survive in the jungle their skills become useless and you know the ecological and social impacts of that are really profound and I both read reports about that I studied that on paper but I also saw it face to face and and what-have-you but it is sickening to me how this type of denial of what you see with your own eyes denying the reality you see directly whether it's on the farm or in the forest and how this can be linked to this kind of nationalism this kind of phony nationalism even when it's it's not your nation even when it's not your business even when your desire your ego etc is actually not involved in any way I know I had more anecdotes to tell about this but you know I think I'm gonna try to be a bit more synoptic here this is one of the things that makes government policy itself so scary is that a small number of people in charge can simply have unrealistic views of the world and they can ignore problems even when they're quite evident in front of their eyes and then those problems can get worse and worse whether it entails the deaths of millions of people or the deaths of millions of animals or the total destruction of a river or the destruction of a lake or what have you the capacity for human beings to only acknowledge evidence that confirms what they want to believe is terrifying not in a moment not in a snapshot not in one moment of time but over years Uemura so I did all this research during my years and said these days including research on agriculture it's just always been the kind of guy I am for me our grocer has always been an important part of the fabric of society and economy and so on before I was vegan and so on by complete luck when I was taking a flight to a remote part of Laos where I was going to do humanitarian work there was this guy waiting for the flight he was German and I struck up conversation them the flight was delayed and was actually cancelled eventually but we waited for some time before they told us it was canceled and I started talking to him and he was the German government attache this is a guy getting a salary paid for by the German government who had been sent to Lausanne and was in charge of their development projects their charity projects that were really focused that time in developing the rubber industry so I'd done enough reading I really did understand the economics of rubber production and what was going on the industry at that point up to up to a certain level so I started to ask him some very intelligent and specific questions but what was going on with the project and the the remaking of the country because country was being transformed by planting rubber crops and so on now he said a number of things to me that were kind of factually false and observed and this guy he's not part of the communist government he's also not elected he's he's not his nationalism is attached to Germany not Laos but I remember so we talk and there are these various problems ecological and ethical and economic but one of the most dismissive things he said was I just pointed to him I said look you know um well I don't understand about these plans and projections anytime you look at a chart historically of the value of rubber it goes up but it also goes down I don't understand why this project which is you know destroying the forests and changing military lives I don't know why it assumes rubber will always be so valuable why you know rubber will never decline in price historically every so often the price of rubber comes crashing down and I also said technologically I knew some other details there are more and more substitutes there are more and more things being made out of special plastics that don't require organic rubber rubber from a that don't require rubber from a natural tree and he laughed he laughed in a totally self-confident way and you said hahahaha China wants to buy so much rubber the price will never go down if somebody in the industry said that to you like if an employee of coca-cola corporation tells you that coca-cola is never gonna go out of style okay you work for Coke you're biased I understand you know if he were an employee of a rubber corporation that'd be one thing if he were a member of the Lao Communist Party that'd be nothing to remember the local government but this is supposed to be an independent charity worker and scholar representing the public interest and the plight of the poor and doing development projects to help you know and it's so easy for him to ignore the disasters that are right in front of his face now I had another experience I won't tell the story still go on too long but I had experience with one of my bosses in humanitarian work where he was literally ignoring a forest being cut down where the forest hadn't just been cut down it was burned black a field of black ashes and he was telling himself the forest was still there another example actually of a wetlands being destroyed and legally on paper the I won't mention one of the big international NGOs they were pretending that wetlands were still there they were receiving money millions of dollars from Europe millions of euros they should say from Europe to do this project to this wetlands the wetland doesn't exist anymore the Chinese Housing Development and a new stadium that were built on those wetlands they were getting paid money to preserve the wetlands wetlands were gone now that that case was just corruption but I mean you know with my boss and not seeing the forest be destroyed these are related examples from my perspective the Italian guy who could not see starvation when it was in front of him people who go on vacation and cannot see deforestation when it's right in front of them going to Switzerland and seeing the animals in the field like goats in the side of the mountain and just seeing it as peaceful ultimately the contrast you have to be able to make I would say is based on the wild and thus habitat conservation is so important in my approach to veganism ecology and related politics you can ride a bicycle through the same part of Laos where I rode a bicycle and you can fail to see the deforestation why because you see plants of some kind by the side of the road you don't know that what a forest looks like in that part of Laos is a 30 meter canopy all right when you're talking about habitats that can support elephants you're not talking about trees that are only 1 meter higher than the elephant ok you're talking about intact old-growth tropical rainforest we have levels and levels of trees going up ultimately 30 meters and where the trees you know form a cave-like structure over your heads and block of the Sun all these and you know there's this level of mist that's trapped under leaves it's like a little mini atmosphere that's why people call it a rainforest and so on all right that's that's forest all right but all kinds of tourists go through Laos and Yunnan and because of our trees of any kind of our trees as thick as my arm that are two meters high they think they're looking at a forest right and they're not they're looking at total ecological devastation in a valley that used to have tigers and elephants I mean Tigers are apex predators and then going down the list used to have an amazing variety of other smaller animals that human beings don't tend to care as much about emotionally right you can't solve the problem without first being able to perceive the problem and I think this is something that ecology has in common with questions of ethics it's so easy to go to northern Laos or downtown Toronto and to not see poverty to not see homelessness to not see drug addiction I trust me small towns in northwestern Laos have huge drug problems huge as a tourist you wouldn't see them as a foreigner you don't see them if you're not looking for them right you have to take a real interest you have to know what to look for or know who to talk to you just ask about it you know and people of many way if you know how to ask people will tell you people say oh yeah you know my cousin became a drug addict and over over there there's a hut where the drug addicts go to get high you know if you're just walking past it looks like any other hut in a village full of huts right you don't solve the problem you don't address the problem without first perceiving the problem and I started up by saying nationalism and the assumption that these are our people and these are good people that blinds people to the problem even when they're looking at it because what they see may just be the goats in the field right what they see may just be a nice village full of huts Oh what they see may be the grassy side of a mountain and they don't realize that the grass may look green and beautiful but actually that grass indicates devastation because they're not thinking about what kind of ecology what kind of habits was there before human beings cut it down and destroyed it mine I don't know I've said in earlier videos you know so much was wrong with the paradigm we had in 2001 the anarcho primitive s paradigm but one strength that had one profound advantage it had over what we're doing with veganism and ecological politics today was that it included the contrast between civilization and the wild the question of what wilderness is now where I differ from them is that I do not think the wilderness is an ideal to be aspired to I don't think we should aspire to be wild ourselves or to have a society that resembles nature that nature is a standard for purity or goodness I don't believe that however I do believe that the wilderness and intact habitat are in this sense a a crucial criterion in analysis for understanding what's wrong what's unsustainable what must be problematized what the problems are we need to have solutions for here and now
several points in this video I am going to make reflections that are directly relevant to veganism and the politics we have to think about in relation to ecology etc these days but the core issue what I'm talking about here this is drawing on and reflecting on a little bit more broadly my own life experience political and otherwise open with an anecdote I had a boss when I was working in Thailand and he was born and raised in Germany and he was a young child during the Nazi period but he had many memories of the period in the immediate aftermath of World War two when the country was being rebuilt and when many people include his including his own parents were looking back on their recent memories of what the Nazi period had been now his mother he said to me was not an intelligent woman she was sort of a bumpkin from a small town who really did not understand what the Nazi Party was when she became a member so she was among the many millions of people who joined partly out of ignorance and the truth of that will be shown in the rest of this anecdote one day she read a story in the newspaper and it's interesting that this was in a German newspaper in Nazi Germany during the Nazi period a story responding to claims made by some foreign countries that the Holocaust was happening of course it wasn't called the Holocaust yet but that there were accusations that the Germans were engaged in mass murder of Jews various other ethnic minorities and political enemies of the state of course anyone that Nazis wanted to kill in death camps labor camps etc she went completely guilelessly she went to a public meeting of the Nazi Party in her town as she was a member and she held up this article she clipped out of the newspaper and said passionately that she knew this wasn't true that she knew the Holocaust couldn't because um our people wouldn't do this she said she made the claim that she didn't believe her fellow party members or her fellow countrymen would do this because she felt that they were good people that we were good people and now the reaction of this is also very German culturally you kind of have to live in Germany to to picture this but everyone in the room was silent her fellow audience members because she was speaking from the audience and also the people on the stage who were in charge of the meeting or what have you they all sort of rumpled up their faces you know and looked at her with derision as if to say you must be an idiot but the response was simply this kind of scolding severe silence and she got the message not only was the Holocaust actually happening but everyone in that room was aware it was happening now this is an interesting anecdote in many ways it challenges the myth that nobody knew you know many people pretended they had no idea what's going on and some I mean hey some people had no idea but a lot of people did know what was going on um but it also punctures the myth that there was no way to show defiance because she responded to that happening at that meeting by quitting the Nazi Party very publicly and angrily and quitting for the reason that she felt the Holocaust was immoral that killing people in this way of this kind of political activity was and I said when she wasn't arrested and she wasn't punished she carried on being a housewife and raising the young child who would later become my boss and who would tell me this story this delusion are people good people who are the good people and the notion that good people don't do bad things and that therefore what you're telling me must be wrong or what I read in the newspaper what must be wrong or maybe that's happening in another country but it's not happening here these are really powerful delusions that motivate an animate in life and they come up in connection to veganism under many headings they definitely come up in connection to veganism you know when you meet people who think who really believe oh yes in China the fur industry does these cruel and terrible things to animals but we would never do that in Sweden we would never do that in Norway or Finland you know I don't know in this country people treat animals with respect unlike Russia right next door or China far away I grew up with one of the most absurd of these nationalistic distinctions being foisted on me my parents were of the generation who protested against the Vietnam War and their view of the world and their view of the United States of America was very much shaped by the historical experience of the Vietnam War and I can remember I mean they they said casually with with no source I mean they'd never read the setting where I know whatever made the claim that somehow the terrible things about the meat industry would be true in the United States but not in Canada that somehow Canada's meat industry was morally blessed um in some fundamental way that our people wouldn't do this and our governments wouldn't do this right but by the way the the notion that Canada didn't get any blood on its hands in Vietnam is also false but that's that that's a story for another time I remember there was one day a very good news story I remember it being on the radio on our government controlled radio CBC radio this was the government criticizing itself in reality and they went out and and interviewed workers in slaughterhouses as well as interviewing government ministers and trade experts because the question was not the animal rights but had to do with standards of Hygiene and international trade and economic factors it was many other facets of the meat industry being examined not the animal rights but the animal rights came up because the actual conditions of slaughter were part of the story and everyone from the kind of you know bureaucrat experts down to the guys who actually work with guys who drive the trucks I remember they interviewed some of the guys who drive the trucks because they knew the conditions inside the buildings they were collect the various buildings they were collecting the meat from very saw houses everyone at every level confirmed that the conditions in Canada were much worse than the United States at that's high that in the United States there were some standards being enforced for everything from hygiene to you know the rapid nests with which animals were killed or what-have-you and that in Canada situation was much worse now these things can change a lot within ten years they can change even more in 20 years I have no reason to think they've changed but for me as a kid what made the biggest impression was that when I reported this to my mother I said you know like what you've been telling me is not true and you know what people say in general is not true our slaughterhouse conditions our meatpacking conditions in Canada are not better than the United States they're actually much worse and my mother responded with absolute denial and again it's this notion the same notion I just quoted from the history of Germany our people wouldn't do this our nation wouldn't do this you know or wanting to believe that our people are good people and that good people don't do bad things this came up in the long long interview I did with Zarya very briefly I mentioned the problem of nationalism it's come up in a couple of my videos in the books of Song of Ice and Fire it's a fictional book series that's now a famous TV show called Game of Thrones there's a dialogue at one point where someone reflects I'm paraphrasing friendly but it points out something this isn't presented as terrifying but it's just presented as an aspect of human nature that is terrifying it comments on the type of men engaged in atrocities during war during the wars their happiness books and so you know these are the type of guys these guys in this unit the army once every couple of years there will be a war and they'll rape and pillage and torture and burn down villages and you know fight knife to knife blade to blade and then the war will end and they'll go home and wash their hands and take care of their wives and children and work in a mill or on a farm and become completely normal and indistinguishable from the rest of the population now those books the the reason why they're interested me is exactly this type of very ashen reflection on human nature war or politics and morality which is a small percentage of the text there are very very long books but you get those moments every so often that really resonate with me I think resonate with other people who have a sort of political science background the horrors of war are made more profound by the fact that the people who commit those atrocities are mostly not different from you and I they mostly are normal people or to put it another way if they're given the opportunity to be normal people they will be even if they're abnormal even if there's somewhat terrible people and one of the most extreme examples Anu of that the publisher I used to work in the publishing industry I was an editor of nonfiction books academic books but non fact history politics stuff my publisher that employed me in in Thailand they had they had a first-person account from one of the torture houses in Cambodia under communism this is one of the buildings where people were arrested tortured and of course executed interrogated and so on but basically everyone was killed nobody was ever released as innocent I don't I don't think there are any exceptions but anyway this was a book written it was based on interviews with a guy who had survived in in this within this facility now after the war was over this is a famous facility famous death camp where people were executed huge numbers the the guy who wrote this book he became an employee of the death camp when it was turned into a museum it was turned into a memorial to record this history and to provide a place of mourning people to go to and there weren't that many people carrying out the executions there was one guy who was the main torturer an executor on the you know other people killed people in smaller numbers but there one guy who really did the bulk of the killing and there were no trials there was no justice there were at the end of the war people just stopped fighting and this guy the main executor the main torturer who had been a you know terror and suffering and death to so many people you know he came to visit the museum as a normal guy and the main executive the guy who was in charge and gave the orders he did eventually decades later go on trial but so many decades had passed between the atrocities and the trial that he was able to indicate that as soon as the war was over he went back to living like a normal guy he actually did some charity work to but you know the notion the two things that first there's the notion of our people then there's the notion of good people and then the third step is the delusion that good people don't do bad things and on the contrary good people do bad things and bad people do good things and life is full of those kinds of contradictions and of course if you have the detachment or if you have the nihilism you can take the next next step of saying there really is no distinction between our people and other people there are just people now I am NOT saying this because I don't believe in personal accountability I think I mean I raised this again in the conversation with Zarya but that that part of conversation go anywhere I think it's actually really interesting to to ask the question of should people be morally accountable for killing animals whether it's participating in vivisection experiments that are proven to be immoral and cruel like some of these really examples or killing animals for leather or what have you I think there is a really interesting question about actually putting people on trial and at the end of you know the Cambodian genocide one of the many great failings I feel was exactly that there there were no trials there was no accountability huge number of people died in combat but for people who had blood on their hands who didn't die in combat um a lot of them went on to positions of privilege in the the new order that was established brokered by the United States China and other other foreign partners and of course above all Vietnam Vietnam controlled the destiny of Cambodia in many ways for many years if you've been playing a drinking game of having a shot of vodka every time I mention Cambodia you're now you're now thoroughly drunk so the other big topic I wanted to link this to I had a conversation with Jenny who is one of my subscribers on on patreon here there is in fact more than one Jenny already on my mind subscribes so don't assume it's the right Jenny because we have a few Jenny's already but you know Jenny shared a link to one of my recent videos she shared a link I think via Facebook doesn't matter she shared a link to my video that was discussing the problem of palm oil and vegan misconceptions about vegan hysteria about palm oil farming in particular and she got an extreme reaction from a guy who is living in Bangkok Thailand a white man who works for the United Nations so he's very much a foreigner and I've encountered this many many times in humanitarian work in life abroad in life as an expatriate said etcetera what this guy was doing fundamentally is just as stupid as the attitude of the woman at that meeting of the Nazi Party in World War two or her attitude when she arrived at the meeting she left that meeting a little bit wiser which is that he was stuck in and he was absolutely adamant that it's impossible that these people do this and he backed this up with and this is always misleading anecdotal evidence you know from isolated experience he's visited a farm he's visited a durian farm he's you know I'm I myself as a child I've visited a you know a sheep farm I've visited a goat farm and yeah it looks beautiful there are there are goats wandering on the hillside you can't see how perverse it is how violent it is how terrible it is by just looking at that snapshot of goats wandering in a field and you can't even understand how unnatural it is without comparing it to conditions in the wild now our most notorious for raising this when challenging pet ownership of saying no no look at how feral dogs live look at how wild dogs live and now question again the morality of what you're doing with with dog ownership but even with meat agriculture or with raising animals for milk or leather when you look at those goats standing in a in a grassy field on the side of a mountain it may look beautiful and they look peaceful peaceful is a word that springs to mind when you walk out and see that the goats are all female where are the male's the goats are all the same age right there are no elderly goats they don't have a normal pack formation have you ever seen how goats really live in the wild where there are old and young and male and female and the male's compete for dominance and they have predators and cetera et cetera you know actually what you're looking at just by the absence of the males already is profoundly distorted and as with chickens and everything else that these questions are killing all the mails or castrating the males raising them for me to what-have-you but there are these various ways in which human beings have already shaped the whole scenario even if you're just looking at that snapshot and the step beyond that as I've already said in one video is of not looking at the snapshot not looking at one moment in time but looking at the whole life cycle of saying ok this is a moment in a cycle that includes slaughter but of course it also includes breeding and it includes feeding includes the question of where does that food come from you know now I know talk to people already know this stuff but I'm drawing attention to the fact that you know there's a different type of thinking involved for a vegan seeing the world in those terms of refusing to buy into the peaceful snapshot you know a snapshot of nature or of a national industry and for some countries that vision you know the goats on the hill is a source of national pride definitely for Spain you know in the Pyrenees lost piranhas and you know for for Switzerland for many countries that you know the mountainside agriculture probably northern Italy - that's actually a source of pride they see that as beautiful they see that as part of their national glory or heritage or what-have-you and understandably you know if it's just a snapshot if it's just a postcard it looks beautiful but I think veganism in principle is in part a refusal to buy the postcard and insistence and moving beyond the postcard but nationalism itself is a distraction the notion these are our people these are good people good people do do don't do bad things and it's sickening to me but this guy in Bangkok whom Jenny was talking to just as a foreign expert I mean he had obviously bought in so deeply to this mindfuck for a lack of a better word part in my course language that he didn't want to accept you you know sort of violently refused to accept the very obviously self obviously true things self-evidently true things that I say about what goes on in a durian farm and on many other types of fruit farms I just mentioned now in Southeast Asia you know you may read things referring to that they have to kill like squirrels with a with a rifle the animals of a squirrel is not quite accurate there are animals there that are that are sometimes called raccoons that are not reckons they're animals called a civet cats there are a lot of things besides I mean I mentioned monkeys and pigs there were all kinds of animals that come to eat fruit on farm and that indeed there's a man with a rifle to kill those animals and of course you know there are other methods of putting up nets and putting out poison there are all kinds of ways that people are killing animals every day and again you know I wish I could say I don't understand how people convince themselves this can't possibly be true even though it's so logical it's so obvious it's self-evident but I know exactly how they convince themselves on the one hand it's these factors I've described its kind of phony nationalism and in the other hand it's having been there it's having seen the postcard of course you can visit a farm you visit a fruit farm for five minutes say oh it's beautiful and leave but just as I was describing moving beyond the postcard with understanding you know whether it's cattle or goats the goats in the side of the mountain there's also moving beyond the static image the postcard image of the fruit hanging on the tree to seeing a whole cycle which includes these of pesticides and everything else now some vegans don't want to do that because some vegans want to believe fruit agriculture is perfectly moral or green agriculture is perfectly moral whereas meat agriculture is totally evil I got one email from someone who claimed to have a degree in the sciences of some kind and said they didn't believe grain farming killed anything it was I don't know where he got you to plumber um and I remember I didn't feel like writing a long email back I just sent a link to the Wikipedia entry for you know groundhogs in Saskatchewan it's a specific species Richardson's ground squirrel we call them groundhogs prairie dogs the names we use are inaccurate and English is scientifically inaccurate via the Wikipedia article dissection forum pest control for the speech you know there is a course a tremendous culture and Industry of human beings killing these animals so that we can get grown do you think you think anything in nature resembles a modern wheat farm you think anything in the jungle resembles an orchard producing Makos thank we I digress um I've encountered this kind of mentality among white Western people in Southeast Asia again and again what they're wanting to buy in there was an Italian guy who I just met I met him once alone and then met him with his wife and kid when I was doing humanitarian work in northwestern Laos and I knew the statistics off the top of my head at that time it was both my job and my interest but I bumped into this guy and he had done some volunteer work for two weeks or something and then had gone back to Italy and come back on vacation with his wife and he said to me with total arrogant self-confidence nobody here is poor nobody here is starving that's all nonsense made up by Western governments made nonsense made about Western governments to justify foreign intervention this is kind of left-wing conspiracy thinking and he you know he was a left-wing [ __ ] this is just an excuse for you know for people like me to come and do charity work yeah right we're making up excuses to go live in that bamboo hut huh um and he said the people here are you know they have no problem with poverty or starvation because they can go out in the woods and gather food anytime they can feed themselves by just wandering in the forest sort of Hill glamorized image of what hunting and gathering is like and I just said to him offhand I need the exact percentage of the time I said something like in this province 40% of people are dependent on foreign donated food and otherwise they would starve or flee you know now 40 percent is not the number but I knew the percent of time and it was a very high percentage like that for that province it's not for the whole country it's for that that little area and that was an area that was devastated in the war with the Americans blah blah blah there are historical reasons as to why it was so so desperate and again in reality if they weren't getting that food donated to them they wouldn't starve they would migrate they would just go somewhere else where they could find a job and find food which I'm not saying is a good thing I'm just saying this the reality they wouldn't sit in one place and starve to death they would walk relatively short distance I have probably run away to Thailand and you know it work as illegal migrants in Thailand if that kind of assistance stopped if people like me working working with the agency if the agency I worked with stopped handing them sacks of rice that you know had a stamp on them saying you know gift of Finland with the UN logo on it or whatever um anyway I remember this guy the arrogance was so great and his sense of nationalism his sense of pride and he's not lotion he's not from that country he's Italian but his sense of you know these are good people you know that somehow I was taking away the the pride of these people by being realistic was it was it was absurd and and deeply offensive to me and I remember how mocking and scornful he was and again what I was saying was so inherently plausible I said to him look I understand you've witnessed people walking around in the forest gathering food which can be very impressive if you go with indigenous tribal people who know how to gather food out of the forest you walk around the jungle with tribal people in order to do that they walk around and they see something and dig up the roots and pull it out wow it makes a big impression on you I said but that kind of gathering of food it can feed a tribe of five people a tribe of thirty people maximum and those groups the mountain top groups they lived in small small groups of people you know each mountain top at just a couple people with with some of those groups said that that can't feed 10,000 people it's not a staple of the diet for tens of thousands of people that's not the way this is not comparable to like the green industry in Canada filling up huge silos and trucks with enormous of quantities of grain that feed millions of people in the cities and the other thing I said to him was and you know you must realize the jungle is all being cut down as tragic but you would see it you know I remember okay one entity leads to another but I remember there was one village I arrived in to do humanitarian work and had a peculiar sort of Vista because it was actually machette on a sort of plateau at the top of a mountain it's not quite worth sure but you go up a mountain and there's a flat area at the top of the mound you go down so you would see around in a in a peculiar way and I remember the first day I walked to work there I walked and you could see the stark difference there was a line on the horizon where the deforestation was you know like so you know there's forest or jungle what everyone say and there's a line and the ground is just bare you know is it barren and I thought to myself you know you do a lot of thing you do stuff when you're the only person who speaks English in the village because otherwise I was speaking just in lotion all day every day you do a lot of thinking yourself you make an art of having a conversation with yourself because nobody else speaks English but I've thought to myself and chuckled oh haha I bet you can see that line move you know every few days you know you thought that and went to work and a couple days later I went to work again and the line had moved and I felt emotionally devastated you know I felt terrible looking at that I thought oh my god you know I was just joking with myself but it's literally true you know that's the pace of deforestation here within a couple of days you can see the last of the jungle being erased anyway and those people those indigenous people who know how to hunt and know how to gather herbs and you know know how to dig up roots out of the earth to try to survive in the jungle their skills become useless and you know the ecological and social impacts of that are really profound and I both read reports about that I studied that on paper but I also saw it face to face and and what-have-you but it is sickening to me how this type of denial of what you see with your own eyes denying the reality you see directly whether it's on the farm or in the forest and how this can be linked to this kind of nationalism this kind of phony nationalism even when it's it's not your nation even when it's not your business even when your desire your ego etc is actually not involved in any way I know I had more anecdotes to tell about this but you know I think I'm gonna try to be a bit more synoptic here this is one of the things that makes government policy itself so scary is that a small number of people in charge can simply have unrealistic views of the world and they can ignore problems even when they're quite evident in front of their eyes and then those problems can get worse and worse whether it entails the deaths of millions of people or the deaths of millions of animals or the total destruction of a river or the destruction of a lake or what have you the capacity for human beings to only acknowledge evidence that confirms what they want to believe is terrifying not in a moment not in a snapshot not in one moment of time but over years Uemura so I did all this research during my years and said these days including research on agriculture it's just always been the kind of guy I am for me our grocer has always been an important part of the fabric of society and economy and so on before I was vegan and so on by complete luck when I was taking a flight to a remote part of Laos where I was going to do humanitarian work there was this guy waiting for the flight he was German and I struck up conversation them the flight was delayed and was actually cancelled eventually but we waited for some time before they told us it was canceled and I started talking to him and he was the German government attache this is a guy getting a salary paid for by the German government who had been sent to Lausanne and was in charge of their development projects their charity projects that were really focused that time in developing the rubber industry so I'd done enough reading I really did understand the economics of rubber production and what was going on the industry at that point up to up to a certain level so I started to ask him some very intelligent and specific questions but what was going on with the project and the the remaking of the country because country was being transformed by planting rubber crops and so on now he said a number of things to me that were kind of factually false and observed and this guy he's not part of the communist government he's also not elected he's he's not his nationalism is attached to Germany not Laos but I remember so we talk and there are these various problems ecological and ethical and economic but one of the most dismissive things he said was I just pointed to him I said look you know um well I don't understand about these plans and projections anytime you look at a chart historically of the value of rubber it goes up but it also goes down I don't understand why this project which is you know destroying the forests and changing military lives I don't know why it assumes rubber will always be so valuable why you know rubber will never decline in price historically every so often the price of rubber comes crashing down and I also said technologically I knew some other details there are more and more substitutes there are more and more things being made out of special plastics that don't require organic rubber rubber from a that don't require rubber from a natural tree and he laughed he laughed in a totally self-confident way and you said hahahaha China wants to buy so much rubber the price will never go down if somebody in the industry said that to you like if an employee of coca-cola corporation tells you that coca-cola is never gonna go out of style okay you work for Coke you're biased I understand you know if he were an employee of a rubber corporation that'd be one thing if he were a member of the Lao Communist Party that'd be nothing to remember the local government but this is supposed to be an independent charity worker and scholar representing the public interest and the plight of the poor and doing development projects to help you know and it's so easy for him to ignore the disasters that are right in front of his face now I had another experience I won't tell the story still go on too long but I had experience with one of my bosses in humanitarian work where he was literally ignoring a forest being cut down where the forest hadn't just been cut down it was burned black a field of black ashes and he was telling himself the forest was still there another example actually of a wetlands being destroyed and legally on paper the I won't mention one of the big international NGOs they were pretending that wetlands were still there they were receiving money millions of dollars from Europe millions of euros they should say from Europe to do this project to this wetlands the wetland doesn't exist anymore the Chinese Housing Development and a new stadium that were built on those wetlands they were getting paid money to preserve the wetlands wetlands were gone now that that case was just corruption but I mean you know with my boss and not seeing the forest be destroyed these are related examples from my perspective the Italian guy who could not see starvation when it was in front of him people who go on vacation and cannot see deforestation when it's right in front of them going to Switzerland and seeing the animals in the field like goats in the side of the mountain and just seeing it as peaceful ultimately the contrast you have to be able to make I would say is based on the wild and thus habitat conservation is so important in my approach to veganism ecology and related politics you can ride a bicycle through the same part of Laos where I rode a bicycle and you can fail to see the deforestation why because you see plants of some kind by the side of the road you don't know that what a forest looks like in that part of Laos is a 30 meter canopy all right when you're talking about habitats that can support elephants you're not talking about trees that are only 1 meter higher than the elephant ok you're talking about intact old-growth tropical rainforest we have levels and levels of trees going up ultimately 30 meters and where the trees you know form a cave-like structure over your heads and block of the Sun all these and you know there's this level of mist that's trapped under leaves it's like a little mini atmosphere that's why people call it a rainforest and so on all right that's that's forest all right but all kinds of tourists go through Laos and Yunnan and because of our trees of any kind of our trees as thick as my arm that are two meters high they think they're looking at a forest right and they're not they're looking at total ecological devastation in a valley that used to have tigers and elephants I mean Tigers are apex predators and then going down the list used to have an amazing variety of other smaller animals that human beings don't tend to care as much about emotionally right you can't solve the problem without first being able to perceive the problem and I think this is something that ecology has in common with questions of ethics it's so easy to go to northern Laos or downtown Toronto and to not see poverty to not see homelessness to not see drug addiction I trust me small towns in northwestern Laos have huge drug problems huge as a tourist you wouldn't see them as a foreigner you don't see them if you're not looking for them right you have to take a real interest you have to know what to look for or know who to talk to you just ask about it you know and people of many way if you know how to ask people will tell you people say oh yeah you know my cousin became a drug addict and over over there there's a hut where the drug addicts go to get high you know if you're just walking past it looks like any other hut in a village full of huts right you don't solve the problem you don't address the problem without first perceiving the problem and I started up by saying nationalism and the assumption that these are our people and these are good people that blinds people to the problem even when they're looking at it because what they see may just be the goats in the field right what they see may just be a nice village full of huts Oh what they see may be the grassy side of a mountain and they don't realize that the grass may look green and beautiful but actually that grass indicates devastation because they're not thinking about what kind of ecology what kind of habits was there before human beings cut it down and destroyed it mine I don't know I've said in earlier videos you know so much was wrong with the paradigm we had in 2001 the anarcho primitive s paradigm but one strength that had one profound advantage it had over what we're doing with veganism and ecological politics today was that it included the contrast between civilization and the wild the question of what wilderness is now where I differ from them is that I do not think the wilderness is an ideal to be aspired to I don't think we should aspire to be wild ourselves or to have a society that resembles nature that nature is a standard for purity or goodness I don't believe that however I do believe that the wilderness and intact habitat are in this sense a a crucial criterion in analysis for understanding what's wrong what's unsustainable what must be problematized what the problems are we need to have solutions for here and now