The Ukrainian Dog-Termination scheme
In 2009 and 2010, in order to “clean” the towns for the preparation of the EURO 2012 soccer cup, the Ukrainian authorities have designed a very singular plan.
Indeed, they have invented a mobile crematorium station device aimed at exterminating the errant dogs.
In fact errant dogs are to be found massively in the streets of almost every town, city or village in Ukraine.
As far as I know, the reason is the brutal impoverishment of the Ukrainian population that led to a situation where dogs couldn’t be fed anymore by their masters. This population of dogs is constantly fueled by the permanent arrival of new abandoned dogs (because of new impoverishment at a constant rate), and by reproduction between these errant dogs.
Most of the time, these dogs are rather nice, kind are not aggressive.
They are just wandering in the streets without any goal with an air of desperation, having lost any hope to get food or a new home. They don’t mean any harm. In general they are expected to survive only a few months after their abandon or after their birth. They die either from starvation (nobody would feed them) or cold (when came the winter season) or they are hit by a car, a truck, etc …
One will be therefore be hardly surprised that only very, very few Ukrainians actually own a pet dog and that the specie of dog that have been attached to man for millenaries seems to be very unwelcome in Ukraine (apart , of course , the case of some very aggressive mastiffs owned by local mafia-moguls) .
Most Ukrainians have found with these errant dogs an easy target; blaming them for all the problems, considering them as “criminals” or parasites (couldn’t they get a job these tramp-dogs?)
Nevertheless, the Ukrainian government did once plan the total eradication of errant dogs for 2012 (they have stopped – or paused – since thanks to a worldwide petition)
What they have created (apparently from a device aimed at burning dead animal bodies ...) for this purpose, as we mentioned it earlier, is a singular exterminating-machine, very primitive in its design but very efficient for its purpose:
Their idea was indeed to put a gas-powered Owen on wheel. The Owen had the shape of a large iron container closed with a cap. Inside the container, a powerful burner was continuously operating so that the internal heat would be extremely high.
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| A view of the mobile dog exterminating station ... |
Next, all over the country, “agents” had been provided with this device and had been sent in the streets, chasing for errant dogs. The process was simple enough: the dogs would be captured then thrown alive in the hellish fire where they would burn almost instantly. Not instantly. Their flesh would be completely consumed in no more half a minute.
30 seconds of pure horror: the dog would shriek like no dogs before him. The shriek of a living being that see and feels its whole body burning , its flesh becoming jelly , his blood boiling , his bones melting … How much time were they conscious before they died ? One thing is sure: they didn’t die instantaneously for hardly dogs can die from fear by cardiac arrest.
These horrible shrieks … not something to trouble the nerves of the calm, cold-blooded dog terminators… however these unemployed and unskilled people, having themselves being complaisantly reduced to the state of living legume-zombies after (at least) 20 years of poverty and continuous mental dumbering, they are not likely to produce any kind of complex human feelings or thoughts – not to mention the motivation of a tremendous global package of 100 UAH (around 10 U.S $ …) with additional primes that could total up to 10 or 20 UAH ( 1 or 2 U.S $ ) .
This happened in the whole of Ukraine. Only a few courageous people had the will and guts to protest and it is only after a huge worldwide petition and the commitment of the world elite sports representatives themselves to make this dog-massacre to stop, than the government ordered this plan to be stopped (or let us say at least to be paused until the end of the 2012 soccer cup) .
We should not be unfair with the actual government, this mad plan was conceived during the (also mad) Iouchenko-Timochenko regime.
When the termination process was forced to stop, more then 100,000 dogs had been burnt (and these are the Ukrainians statistics)
Now the reader is certainly asking him: well … this is very interesting, but what on earth this article has to do with the blog of an association fighting anti-Semitism? Are you an animal defender that is trying to compare the horror of the Shoah with the industrial killing of chickens?
I am certainly not an animal defender. I am working for an an association monitoring anti-Semitism in Ukraine.
The terms used by the animal defenders were those of “animal-shoah”, “process dignified of Auswitch”, Nazi-like plan”.
And here comes the very precise difficulty of this article because the comparison between animal treatment by the food processing industry and by the slaughterhouse factories have been overabusively compared to the Shoah and this is certainly not what we want to do here.
Yes, indeed, there may be some small elements of comparison between the Shoah and the way animals are been treated by the slaughterhouse factories. The French writer and philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay , president of several organizations for the memory of the Shoah have been working on that very special subject and one can read her very interesting book : "le silence des bêtes, la philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité" ( The Silence of the beasts. Philosophy to the test of animality ) . An other book from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida is also treating this point, this is "L'animal que je suis" (The Animal That Therefore I Am).
But these philosophical debates about the way animals are being slaughtered by the food industry must be intended as one of the many entry point that can be used to fuel the philosophical thoughts about the causes of the Shoah and about the process that led to this abomination, and not the opposite!
We may and must not use the Shoah to think about the slaughtering of animals but we can use the slaughtering of animals as one of the many paths that can allow us to find explanations about the Shoah. The difference might looks subtle but it is fundamental.
Let’s get back to our subject.
In almost all countries over the world, a dog’s life does not really weight much. Most penal codes consider them as objects if they have a master or as merely nothing if they don’t.
But here we are not talking about the status of errant dogs, about the utility to rescue them or not, about the utility to feed them or not, about the utility to collect them all in state kennels or not, about the utility to euthanize those who are ills or aggressive or not. We are not even talking of the fact in itself that Ukraine might want to euthanize the whole population of errant dogs on its ground, however debatable or detestable that might be.
We are talking about the kind of minds that collectively designed, organized and realized such a horrible, surreal and senseless termination campaign. We are talking about a plan designed by the Ukrainian state (or by the closest Ukrainian notion to a state) at a national scale .purely and simply to get rid in a very abnormal, grotesque and monstrous way of a population of errant dogs.
It has to be noted that these people were proud of their plan and that apparently they hardly understood why it has created such a hostile reaction from the countries they wanted to impress by ( what they considered to be ) the rightness and efficiency of it.
But, again, the reader, I am sure, is telling himself that all this is probably very scandalous but still, what does it has to do with anti-Semitism?
I would like to first precise once again that I know that my demonstration is very audacious and that , once again , I am perfectly aware that one can make all sort of parallels that are most of the time irrelevant . One can unfortunately try to compare many things to the Shoah and that is a big mistake because the Shoah cannot be compared to anything that men ever witnessed.
So that especially in an article targeting anti-Semitism in Ukraine, I am taking very big risks of being misunderstood or even to weaken the association. Nevertheless, I will continue my reasoning.
So, why am I writing all this?
Because, among all, I am trying to demonstrate that the very process that have led to the birth of this plan - from its conception to the realization of the operations - show that the Ukrainian society contains this subtle, dangerous and precise combination of madness, idiocy, fanaticism, will for a new order and deep economical problems on a national scale and that this mixture is characteristic of fascism.
Because what we have described here is fundamentally biologically inhuman in its core sense and that this atmosphere of deep inhumanity and contempt of the living beings, of the biological life has become a “national” characteristic of Ukraine. And this context of inhumanity is the root to all fascisms.
And all fascisms fatally and irrevocably end in the threatening of the Jews.
Yes, I know, the reader might find my reasoning very audacious and indeed it is. It is especially always a perilous exercise to compare the slaughtering of animals and the slaughtering of men.
However my goal is to underline that people who have created such silly and horrible plans on a national scale could potentially do almost everything beyond the limit of the reason.
Just let us go a bit further …
After errant dogs, why not targeting the few homeless people in Ukraine? (While very poor, only a very small amount of Ukrainians are homeless thanks to the communism who gave once everyone a house) After all, nobody would really notice and/or care in the context of Ukraine.
And next might come the turn of the (very) miserable refugees who come from Iraq or Afghanistan and who try to enter into the Schengen zone. Where would be the problem? (Again, while millions of Ukrainians have been working or are working in Europe – especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal - illegally, without documents and contracts, the Ukrainian people have massively a null-tolerance toward the illegal immigrants on their ground)
This is not the product of my imagination. Many Ukrainians, from official to average citizens, spend their time claiming that these category of population should be terminated – and be sure they mean it!
Then at last, one can ask ourselves why this process wouldn’t lead to a mechanism where the Jews themselves – at the end of the chain - would be inevitable threatened. The Jews who still live in Ukraine.
And all would have started with the dogs like some say all started, around 90 years, ago with the chickens in a weird Bavarian farm run by an unhappy reader of communist theories, a man named Heinrich Luitpold Himmler.
Ukraine, grounded by its apparently insoluble economical problems is a “prefacist”, a “ready-for-fascism” society and this is beyond all, very disquieting.
That is why an outpost in Ukraine in order to monitor anti-Semitism is fundamental so that the end of this article remains a bad dream and not turns into a reality one of these days.
Joseph Litchblau , UKRLAA
30 seconds of pure horror: the dog would shriek like no dogs before him. The shriek of a living being that see and feels its whole body burning , its flesh becoming jelly , his blood boiling , his bones melting … How much time were they conscious before they died ? One thing is sure: they didn’t die instantaneously for hardly dogs can die from fear by cardiac arrest.
These horrible shrieks … not something to trouble the nerves of the calm, cold-blooded dog terminators… however these unemployed and unskilled people, having themselves being complaisantly reduced to the state of living legume-zombies after (at least) 20 years of poverty and continuous mental dumbering, they are not likely to produce any kind of complex human feelings or thoughts – not to mention the motivation of a tremendous global package of 100 UAH (around 10 U.S $ …) with additional primes that could total up to 10 or 20 UAH ( 1 or 2 U.S $ ) .
This happened in the whole of Ukraine. Only a few courageous people had the will and guts to protest and it is only after a huge worldwide petition and the commitment of the world elite sports representatives themselves to make this dog-massacre to stop, than the government ordered this plan to be stopped (or let us say at least to be paused until the end of the 2012 soccer cup) .
We should not be unfair with the actual government, this mad plan was conceived during the (also mad) Iouchenko-Timochenko regime.
When the termination process was forced to stop, more then 100,000 dogs had been burnt (and these are the Ukrainians statistics)
Now the reader is certainly asking him: well … this is very interesting, but what on earth this article has to do with the blog of an association fighting anti-Semitism? Are you an animal defender that is trying to compare the horror of the Shoah with the industrial killing of chickens?
I am certainly not an animal defender. I am working for an an association monitoring anti-Semitism in Ukraine.
The terms used by the animal defenders were those of “animal-shoah”, “process dignified of Auswitch”, Nazi-like plan”.
And here comes the very precise difficulty of this article because the comparison between animal treatment by the food processing industry and by the slaughterhouse factories have been overabusively compared to the Shoah and this is certainly not what we want to do here.
Yes, indeed, there may be some small elements of comparison between the Shoah and the way animals are been treated by the slaughterhouse factories. The French writer and philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay , president of several organizations for the memory of the Shoah have been working on that very special subject and one can read her very interesting book : "le silence des bêtes, la philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité" ( The Silence of the beasts. Philosophy to the test of animality ) . An other book from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida is also treating this point, this is "L'animal que je suis" (The Animal That Therefore I Am).
But these philosophical debates about the way animals are being slaughtered by the food industry must be intended as one of the many entry point that can be used to fuel the philosophical thoughts about the causes of the Shoah and about the process that led to this abomination, and not the opposite!
We may and must not use the Shoah to think about the slaughtering of animals but we can use the slaughtering of animals as one of the many paths that can allow us to find explanations about the Shoah. The difference might looks subtle but it is fundamental.
Let’s get back to our subject.
In almost all countries over the world, a dog’s life does not really weight much. Most penal codes consider them as objects if they have a master or as merely nothing if they don’t.
But here we are not talking about the status of errant dogs, about the utility to rescue them or not, about the utility to feed them or not, about the utility to collect them all in state kennels or not, about the utility to euthanize those who are ills or aggressive or not. We are not even talking of the fact in itself that Ukraine might want to euthanize the whole population of errant dogs on its ground, however debatable or detestable that might be.
We are talking about the kind of minds that collectively designed, organized and realized such a horrible, surreal and senseless termination campaign. We are talking about a plan designed by the Ukrainian state (or by the closest Ukrainian notion to a state) at a national scale .purely and simply to get rid in a very abnormal, grotesque and monstrous way of a population of errant dogs.
It has to be noted that these people were proud of their plan and that apparently they hardly understood why it has created such a hostile reaction from the countries they wanted to impress by ( what they considered to be ) the rightness and efficiency of it.
But, again, the reader, I am sure, is telling himself that all this is probably very scandalous but still, what does it has to do with anti-Semitism?
I would like to first precise once again that I know that my demonstration is very audacious and that , once again , I am perfectly aware that one can make all sort of parallels that are most of the time irrelevant . One can unfortunately try to compare many things to the Shoah and that is a big mistake because the Shoah cannot be compared to anything that men ever witnessed.
So that especially in an article targeting anti-Semitism in Ukraine, I am taking very big risks of being misunderstood or even to weaken the association. Nevertheless, I will continue my reasoning.
So, why am I writing all this?
Because, among all, I am trying to demonstrate that the very process that have led to the birth of this plan - from its conception to the realization of the operations - show that the Ukrainian society contains this subtle, dangerous and precise combination of madness, idiocy, fanaticism, will for a new order and deep economical problems on a national scale and that this mixture is characteristic of fascism.
Because what we have described here is fundamentally biologically inhuman in its core sense and that this atmosphere of deep inhumanity and contempt of the living beings, of the biological life has become a “national” characteristic of Ukraine. And this context of inhumanity is the root to all fascisms.
And all fascisms fatally and irrevocably end in the threatening of the Jews.
Yes, I know, the reader might find my reasoning very audacious and indeed it is. It is especially always a perilous exercise to compare the slaughtering of animals and the slaughtering of men.
However my goal is to underline that people who have created such silly and horrible plans on a national scale could potentially do almost everything beyond the limit of the reason.
Just let us go a bit further …
After errant dogs, why not targeting the few homeless people in Ukraine? (While very poor, only a very small amount of Ukrainians are homeless thanks to the communism who gave once everyone a house) After all, nobody would really notice and/or care in the context of Ukraine.
And next might come the turn of the (very) miserable refugees who come from Iraq or Afghanistan and who try to enter into the Schengen zone. Where would be the problem? (Again, while millions of Ukrainians have been working or are working in Europe – especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal - illegally, without documents and contracts, the Ukrainian people have massively a null-tolerance toward the illegal immigrants on their ground)
This is not the product of my imagination. Many Ukrainians, from official to average citizens, spend their time claiming that these category of population should be terminated – and be sure they mean it!
Then at last, one can ask ourselves why this process wouldn’t lead to a mechanism where the Jews themselves – at the end of the chain - would be inevitable threatened. The Jews who still live in Ukraine.
And all would have started with the dogs like some say all started, around 90 years, ago with the chickens in a weird Bavarian farm run by an unhappy reader of communist theories, a man named Heinrich Luitpold Himmler.
Ukraine, grounded by its apparently insoluble economical problems is a “prefacist”, a “ready-for-fascism” society and this is beyond all, very disquieting.
That is why an outpost in Ukraine in order to monitor anti-Semitism is fundamental so that the end of this article remains a bad dream and not turns into a reality one of these days.
Joseph Litchblau , UKRLAA
