There Will Be Battlefields

While many face the season of “peace on earth” deeply saddened by recent global events, it’s hard not to wonder why we humans still can’t manage to connect the dots when it comes to the violence on the world stage, and the violence we ourselves participate in, even as we bow our heads in thanks while preparing to dine on the remains of those slaughtered for our celebrations.

Before his death in 490 BCE, it was Pythagoras, one of the most famous of the ancient Greek philosophers, who said “As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other.” Over 2,000 years later, the great Leo Tolstoy reiterated: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” 

These two great thinkers knew that we will never see peace until we learn to practice peace, starting with recognizing the incommensurable oppression of the innocent victims of our own actions.

Billions of sentient individuals live their lives as slaves to our appetites until death is delivered on the killing floor. Handing off the dirty work to those with fewer options, human consumers pray for peace while paying for the imprisonment and captivity of the beings whose bodies generate the products they purchase.

Innocent and vulnerable souls are deprived of their rights and dignity so those with power over them can engage in habits that are not only unnecessary, but deleterious in a myriad of ways. Their individuality and innate worth is ignored not only by those who benefit financially, but also by those who buy what their bodies produce.

As Will Tuttle explains in his groundbreaking book, The World Peace Diet: 

Our inherited meal traditions require a mentality of violence and denial that silently radiates into every aspect of our private and public lives, permeating our institutions and generating the crises, dilemmas, inequities, and suffering that we seek in vain to understand and effectively address. A new way of eating no longer based in privilege, commodification, and exploitation is not only possible but essential and inevitable. Our innate intelligence demands it.

We owe the animals our profoundest apologies. Defenseless and unable to retaliate, they have suffered immense agonies under our domination that most of us have never witnessed or acknowledged. Now knowing better, we can act better, and acting better, we can live better, and give the animals, our children, and ourselves a true reason for hope and celebration.  

In a world where lives are simply viewed as expendable, innocent life will be cast aside whenever someone with enough power stands to benefit, whether the lives in question are those of nonhumans, soldiers, civilians, women, children or the elderly.

We watch our world leaders order young men and women to be mown down in war after war after war, read the words of journalists describing battle zones as “abattoirs” where soldiers are hurried to their graves like “cattle sent to slaughter,” and hear the men and women whose existence impedes the aims of the powerful described as “animals.” As though the very word itself describes those who have no right to life. As though the word does not describe those who bleed, those who feel, those who hope and fear. As though the word does not describe us, ourselves.

Until we begin to respect the force which animates every being who fights for his or her life, we will continue to disregard it in human form.

Or, put another way:

As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other.

As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.