Hitler Was Not A Vegetarian!!!

After making a joke comment about Hitler being a vegetarian I got curious about the subject and actually looked it up. Turns out a surprising amount of ink has been spilled on this, and it even has its own Wikipedia page which contains this hilarious highlighted quote:

"Hitler was in no way an ethical vegetarian," Berry asserts. He believes that it is important to counter the assertions of scholars that the chief Nazi abstained from meat "because nonvegetarians tend to use the Nazi issue to discredit vegetarianism in general."

Wow. That's a pretty stunning amount of stupid. The reductio ad Hitlerum argument is so ridiculous, why would anyone bother to take it seriously, let alone actually write a book to prove (by any means necessary!) Hitler wasn't a vegetarian (and didn't love animals)?

Oops, there I go again, underestimating the human race's (and especially vegetarian activists') capacity for stupid.

You know who else used to breath air? Hitler!!!

Rynn Berry wrote a book about all of this, Hitler: Neither Vegetarian nor Animal Lover, not because he's got a blind agenda bordering on the fanatical, but simply because he's a vegetarian historian. A historian who happens to be a vegetarian but doesn't have an agenda. What I mean to say is that despite serving as historical advisor to the North American Vegetarian Society he's all about the truth at any price.

About his (completely un-revisionist) book Rynn writes this blurb:

I think it is important that people be made aware that the vegetarian movement has a venerable history behind it. It didn't spring full-blown from the head of a flower child in the 1960's. It really begins with Pythagoras in the West in the 6th century BC and has reasserted itself periodically ever since.

Rynn, Rynn, Rynn, you poor, ignorant, undernourished fool. Vindicating vegetarianism with Pythagoras is not a good idea. If you'd done the slightest bit of research you might have discovered that Pythagoras and his followers were likely a bunch of whackos. And there is plenty of evidence that the famous theorem that bears his name had been around long before the 6th century BC. Whether or not Pythagoras was even a vegetarian is even in dispute. What does seem clear is that they were a bunch of nerds living together on an island apparently obsessed with mathematics. So they probably all sat around consuming the 6th century BC equivalent of Cheetos and Coke, while doing the 6th century BC equivalent of quoting Monty Python. Great guys to know  if you wanted to hack a triangle, but not someone you want to take dietary advice from.

So much for a venerable history.

It is quite telling that in the Wikipedia page, the section "Questioning Hitler's vegetarianism" is longer than the section presenting all the solid evidence that Hitler was not only a vegetarian, but a big softie when it came to  animals of all stripes ("How can you eat zat poor chicken, vat about it's family, it's friends?). I can at least console myself with the fact that it is low enough on the radar not to have been completely hijacked by vegan activists like the Wikipedia China Study page.