Autocracy
Addressing Animals and Authoritarianism
Today PAN Works announces its new Flipboard — Autocracy.
As part of our public engagement we curate explanatory social media through the Flipboard app. This creates magazines of popular articles about animal lives. You can find our featured Flipboards here.
Today we are expanding our coverage into the correspondence between rising authoritarianism and its impact on people, animals and nature.
As a concept, autocracy is the opposite of democracy. We are witnessing a far-right shift in politics her in the US and in places across the globe. This fundamentally changes the political landscape of our work for animal wellbeing. Autocracy features not only news about this extremist trend in our politics, but how that is affecting animals, wild and domesticated.
None of this is simple black and white content. By and large, politics based on human supremacy are awful to other beings. This encompasses ideologies of every sort — libertarian, liberal, conservative, reactionary, and fascist. We already start from a low bar.
It is also difficult at times to draw direct lines from the wider moral, political and policy environment, to the treatment of animals. One has to view the unfolding cultural and political realities alongside the contemporary effects on animals to espy the connections between the two.
Yet, there is absolutely no doubt that animals are subject to and frequently victims of human policy decisions. Exactly how animals will fare now and in future under far-right regimes will not always be clear. This makes Autocracy all the more important, as it over time will help correlated developments of far right policies and the wellbeing of animals.
As an independent and nonpartisan think tank dedicated to animal wellbeing, PAN Works does not participate in partisan politics. Instead we help develop society’s ethical capacity to make good public policy decisions. Still, as Aristotle notes, politics is ethics writ large. For this reason, we speak to the moral-political landscape of our times, seeing over the horizon to what ethical issues we ought to address, and what public policies we ought to promote.
Fascism, christian nationalism, paramilitaries, and oligarchy are now core elements of conservative politics here in the USA and elsewhere. Nonprofits seeking the greater good for people, animals or nature better get wise to this fact. Acting as if autocracy is just a ‘little bit worse’ than business as usual is to be willfully blind to the threats it poses now and into the future.
The words of Martin Niemöller are worth noting here. Niemöller was a German christian nationalist, Lutheran theologian, and early supporter of the Nazis. His poem of contrition — “First They Came” (1946) — is displayed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Bill Lynn is the founder of PAN Works
Please visit PAN Works for more about our work on ethics and animal wellbeing.
