Cold hearted horror

When you see pictures of the Nazi prison camps and the Jews being marched to the gas chambers you realise some humans are monsters of cruelty, quite a bit different to those of us who aren’t. They help normalise cruelty, until it is no longer remarked upon.
I saw the movie ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, and it said universal things to me. I felt as though I was there by their side at the end, when they entered the gas chamber. Here’s the scene: we glance up at a figure dropping pellets of lethal gas through a hatch in the roof. At that point innocence evaporates - the two boys face a cold killing ‘machine’. A child’s innocence, just like an animal’s, is being destroyed by unfeeling actions of certain humans - they never realise that such levels of un-feeling could exist. The shock of that spoils something precious ... and for the two boys it was the ultimate assault on their very sentience, their awareness. It must surely be the same shock that animals experience when facing human unfeeling-ness, when they face the executioner’s knife. This is why farmers don’t give their animals names, because they will one day have to let them go, to this ‘knife-in-the-throat-moment’.
There’s not much difference between the death camps for humans and the abattoir for animals - each shows how unfeeling, how ruthless humans can be. And it’s that trait that, in some humans, there can be a machine-mind which will commit acts that can do so much damage to our very consciousness, since it is done without a second thought. If this is the capability within human beings it’s surely an extreme of mental illness that needs to be dissolved, and that can only happen by our own personal disassociation with it. Hence, give up meat and give up associating with the machine-mind.
These images of the abattoir or the gas chamber, the emotion of them sticks in the mind. These acts against the defenceless show how far some human intelligence is corrupted. Out of accumulated fear some humans have gone over the edge, simply to get what they want. And what they want we mustn’t; it needs to be boycotted. Cruelty and violence must always be seen to be unnecessary and inexcusable.
But that’s not how present day humans see it. Nor do animal exploiters themselves see it that way. “Animals”, why make a fuss about them? They are ‘mere’ animals. They don’t have brains like ours. They are incapable of feeling and sensation and are not aware or conscious of anything. They can’t be traumatised because they can’t reflect on their own situation nor can they premeditate their own executions. In short, animals are unaware of what’s happening until it does, so for them there isn’t any anxiety or existential angst.
These explanations have comforted generations of humans. They help to lull the consumer into compliance - whole populations of people have been convinced of one thing, that what happens with animals is alright.