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HUMAN RIGHTS AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
The Forgotten Holocaust — Human Rights, Animal Rights and Oppression
Genocide, slaughter and the ‘Eternal Treblinka’
Ever since the Second World War, the word holocaust has been spoken with shivers and dread to refer to the terrible mass extermination by the Nazis of millions of people in European concentration camps. In this article I want to talk about the forgotten holocaust, one which is frequently overlooked, and involves a terrifying tale of the wholesale abuse of human rights, animal rights and oppression of literally billions of victims.
To this day, it is difficult not to associate the word holocaust with the Jewish people. One reason for this is obviously that the Nazis targeted Jews for extermination on a terrifying scale. Entire Jewish neighbourhoods were isolated, rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps where they were imprisoned, starved, tortured, experimented upon, dehumanised and killed in their hundreds of thousands.
The horror of this cannot be overstated, but we must never forget — and I don’t think that my saying this in any way diminishes the horrors or the murders of up to 6 million Jewish people — that it wasn’t just the Jews who were targeted.
