Morally, mass species extinction through plenticidal indifference is like the Nazi Hunger-Plan-in-slow-motion
If the Nazi Final Solution had been totally successful, ten million European Jews would have died violently by gas or bullet.
If the Nazi Hunger Plan had been totally successful, thirty million Eastern European Slavs and Jews would have slowly and quietly ebbed to death through hunger and cold.
If extent of intention rather than extent of execution marks the true magnitude of evil - and I believe it does, as do most people who have thought about it, then the
Hunger Plan -
though too little known - was the far greater Nazi evil.
There is always a market for movies made up of violence porn - and scenes of mass murders by bullet or gas chambers fills that pornographic need.
Slow starvation deaths makes for bad Hollywood
But extended scenes of slow starvation deaths are much more - not less - painful to watch --- even, or perhaps especially, for violence junkies.
Hollywood has no interest in making movies about slow quiet destructions of human lives and cultures by benign plenticidal neglect.
Slow quiet death (through inadequate land and hence food & fuel resources) to all aboriginals who refused to join modern progressive scientific industrial society was always and everywhere the implicit Hunger Plan from the 1870s to the 1970s.
Our extra special animus against relatively small numbers of powerless aboriginals requires some explaining.
It was because of their great moral power : they dared to question the unquestionable good of Progress and Modern Science and Technology, even as they themselves were clearly slowly starving to death in dismal living conditions.
They dared assault our innermost superego and awake long suppressed doubts we all had about the path of Progress- and for this they must die to let our superegos regain control.
Thirty years later - would the US Civil War have even been fought ?
In 1865, fighting and dying to defend the right of one person to buy another person for the equivalent today of a million dollar home, seemed to make great economic sense.
But that quickly changed as mechanization replaced human hand skills and as the cheap energy slaves embodied in engines and fossil fuel replaced the energy from fragile human and animal slaves.
In the 1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium and his minions expected to extract great wealth from the Congo - but mostly from inert non-living wealth.
They saw no real economic need to keep the people of their Congo alive as forced labour, for working on future renewable resource plantations for example.
They quickly killed off half the entire population - ten million - the world's greatest mass murder ever.
King Leopold's plenticidal indifference
Some they deliberately murdered - but most died through plenticidal indifference.
For to their modern minds, the Congo seemed to have a plentitude of people-to-be-fed-and-clothed - far more than needed to exploit it successful with machinery and fossil fuels.
Best to let the excess 'useless mouths' died quietly from hunger - off stage.
They almost got away with it - perhaps if they had laid off those public capitations of heads and hands - they might well have.
Today, similarly, we can't really get away with the roundup and deliberate killing of a few hundred wolves or feral ponies without a huge hue and cry.
But if 95% of all the frogs in the world die because of a fungus disease spread worldwide as a consequence of a 1950s human pregnancy test, we will all purse our lips for a moment, sigh and then get about with our lives.
Our consciences almost clear.
The world is filled with a plentitude of frogs and frog species - how many do we really need anyway - won't one or two species be more than enough ?
The Sixth Extinction by plenticidal indifference and the Aboriginal (and other) Hunger Plans --- you tell me the moral difference...
