I’ve mentioned a few “vegan” Zionists I’ve encountered in other posts, but it just doesn’t stop. A vegan account I follow on Instagram made a pride post yesterday, and some queerphobic vegans in the comments stated that they are unfollowing because they disagreed with the “LGBT agenda” being supported by the account or some shit like that.
Of course, there were also some people who said they were unfollowing simply because the post was “unrelated” to veganism, but I’m convinced that this just serves as an excuse to make their homophobia look far less homophobic instead of being as genuinely apathetic to the matter as they’re framing themselves to be.
This is all too confusing for me. How do you get conscious to a point of saying “Oppression towards non-human animals is fucked up,” but still keep a disturbing tendency to support oppression of certain humans simply on the basis of who they are?
I’m very much disturbed by how I can encounter some vegans that seem highly principled in supporting animal liberation, but then they turn around and endorse capitalism, racism, imperialism, queerphobia, and many other kinds of reactionary bullshit in the process.
I’m beginning to be done with my efforts to try to understand anyone like this, but do any of you have any idea as to where the hell this type of thinking stems from?
Fascism had always had a thing for expressing compassion towards good causes unrelated to their supremacism. It serves unconsciously as a way of buying indulgence for the evil they do and more consciously it is used cynically to soften their public image by layering their hate in softer messages to make it more palatable to the general public.
There’s a reason why fascists love to protect the welfare of cute animals. They don’t really give a shit about factory farming, doing so would inconvenience the people who fund them, but if a video of someone being mean to a dog or a horse goes viral they go ballistic and are screaming for blood. These are the same people who have just the minute before talked in favour of drowning refugees in the Mediterranean.
Animal welfare aesthetics can also be used as a way to shoehorn their racism. The Nazis claimed to be horrified about Jewish ritual methods of butchering just as modern fascists claim to be horrified about Muslim ritual methods of butchering. In that way it their concern for animal welfare is similar to their claimed concern for women’s and LGBTQ rights, it is primarily seen as a cudgel to beat the people they hate over the head with.
Veganism might go hand in hand with fascism in the same way that is fundamentally alien from the ways veganism can go hand in hand with leftism.
Finally one should also not be blind to the fact that to many people, fascist or not, veganism is more of a health and diet fad than a consistent moral position. It is a consumer choice for them and nothing else.
Everything you said was spot on, add to that the majority of most popular vegan influencers are conventionally attractive white people, who mix in some messaging that vegans are superior to non-vegans, like literally they believe to be “a higher form of evolution”. The deeper you get in the more ubermensch hilterite they all act.
Source: I was in it for 3 years.