Stagg Editorial- January 1996

ALL HAIL THE SEAL HUNT

Ignorance breeds evil. Evil has many faces and much literature has been produced since World War II upon the banality of evil. The utter bureaucratic banality by which the Nazi fascist Adolf Hitler disposed of millions of people is a deeply disturbing study of the obscenity of organized, impersonal murder. Thus we know that evil can be impersonal and that at its source it need not deal with blood and gore and the actual obscenity of murder and destruction. Papers can be shuffled and people can be consigned to gas ovens.

In our global village, ignorance and comfortable, long-distance bigotry can combine to produce evil in a faraway part of the world. A superficial understanding by a wealthy urbanite of the realities of world food production can lead to some obscure and largely invisible paper shuffling that, as if by magic, produces legislation that forbids the basic food harvesting of that distant rural land.

The fact that Mr. and Mrs. Wealthy are woefully ignorant of the sound practices of rural food harvesting serves as the actual foundation for tyrannical and ultimately evil legislation. In the case of the seal hunt, European countries virtually unanimously imposed sanctions against the use of seal products and are often asked to contemplate sanctions against Canadian products in general purely because seal hunters kill seals within the vision of television cameras.

The evils of the global village are, as usual, visited by the urban and the wealthy upon the rural and the poor. Today in Newfoundland the fishing industry lies in ruins and world public opinion is to the effect that Newfoundlanders in their ignorance and greed did it to themselves. The world press conveniently ignores that European pillagers operating totalling outside the law gorged with reckless abandon upon the fishing grounds for half a century. All the new and terrible harvesting technology that could be floated onto the Grand Banks was brought there and set to the task of devouring the fish. In fact while seal hunt sanctions were imposed in the name of humanity and civilization against Newfoundland seal hunters, the most uncivilized, inhumane and evil process of resource destruction was being carried out by the countrymen of those same Europeans who were flaying Newfoundlanders for carrying out a perfectly reasonable seal harvest.

It is almost trite to say that television cameras are not trained on the process of killing animals in slaughter houses. But in fact within the actual vision of many Wealthies, there are slaughter house operations that kill animals in a much more painful and inhumane way than these seals are killed. There are many slaughter houses serving London, England and Los Angeles. Perhaps a few wealthy activists need a trip through one of these at floor level. Then let them bring their rank hypocrisy to this year's seal hunt.

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