J.M. Coetzee
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2003, J.M. Coetzee has evoked the Holocaust analogy in relation to animals in his novel The Lives of Animals (1999) and in several speeches, such as the one made at the Voiceless exhibition in Sydney, 2007, where he describes people's reaction after learning of the Nazi's mass murder of the Jews:
"Of course we cried out in horror when we found out about this. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!"
The full text of his wonderful speech can be found at the following link:
http://hugo.random-scribblings.net/press/interviews-and-other-articles/659-voiceless-i-feel-therefore-i-am-22feb07
His fictional persona, Elizabeth Costello, says the following in The Lives of Animals:
http://hugo.random-scribblings.net/press/interviews-and-other-articles/659-voiceless-i-feel-therefore-i-am-22feb07
His fictional persona, Elizabeth Costello, says the following in The Lives of Animals:
“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed, dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.” (Coetzee, 1999b, 21)