06/13/08 Abolition and Moral Progress

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Animal Friends presents a new web site and invites to a talk by Dr. Steve Best

Human history is full of incomprehensible cruelties. Shameful chapters of history – oppression, slavery, genocide, and war – are all examples of the abuse of power. Whether it’s for profit, ease, convenience or plain amusement, this might-makes-right attitude has caused societies to tolerate and perpetuate these cruel acts.

Most people today view slavery, child labor and the oppression of women as wrong, but changes only came about because thoughtful people demanded justice and fought against oppression. Will future generations look back at ours with the same shame and horror we feel when we read about ships loaded with slaves or child labor in cotton mills? Our generation operates in the same manner. The only difference is that today’s victims – used and abused because they are "different" and powerless – belong to different species.

www.abolicija.com is a new web site, which will be presented to the public and which Animal Friends launched in collaboration with PETA. It speaks about the permanent ties between animal and human rights.

In combination to the presentation of this web project Animal Friends also invites to the lecture of Dr. Steve Best, the Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Texas, El Paso. Working in areas such as philosophy, social and political theory, cultural studies, science and technology studies, animal rights, environmentalism, and biotechnology, he has written and edited 10 books and published over 100 articles and reviews. Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies and Chief Editor of its online Journal for Critical Animal Studies.

Dr. Steve Best will hold a talk on June 13 at 7 P.M. in the Cultural Informative Center, Preradoviceva 5, Zagreb within the promotion of the web site www.abolicija.com.

All shapes of oppression are repulsive – even more when its victims cannot defend themselves because they do not have the means or opportunity to do so. Many brave men and women rebelled against this injustice - Martin Luther King, Emmeline Pankhurst and Mahatma Gandhi included, and many people do that today. Some of them paid the price with their lives because they believed we all have the right to have an opinion of our own in of life. Others paid the price with their freedom.

Animals have the right to a life, without being born to become slaves in factory farms; without being born to be killed and eaten; without being born to be butchered, poisoned and killed in cruel experiments, or left abandoned as trash to die from starvation and disease.

The animals' lives are as important to them as our lives are to us. We must stand up for them, just as good people from other eras spoke out – and even risked their own lives – in order to defend women, children, people used as slaves and other oppressed groups.

''There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.'' - Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel-Prize winning writer (from www.abolicija.com)

Dr. Best will be available for interviews from June 12-14 during his stay in Zagreb.

Steve Best lecture [ 125.52 Kb ]

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