Abstract

and unethical in many cases (such as in the reign of whites over blacks, Germans over Jews, and now males over females), but it nevertheless persists in our society in any number of relationships. Foucault notes that these power-structured relationships cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation, and functioning of (93). It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that discourse is used to promote and protect political relationships in at least two ways: first, it is used to efface the effects of domination, that is, the oppression and exploitation of subordinate groups; and second, it is used to delimit compassion and desensitize the ruling group to the suffering of the subordinate group. Successful effacing and desensitizing rhetorics make it possible for ruling groups to fail to see or be unmoved by the atrocities of domination, even when those atrocities are obvious to subjects who are not members of the ruling group. Rulers produce discourses of truth that efface and justify those atrocities. These discourses are so effective that Millett, for example, rightly incensed by the oppression of females under the patriarchal thumb, apparently failed to notice or was insensitive to the power-structure of the human/non-human animal relationship (a relation-ship in which she is one of the rulers, not one of the ruled). In fact, her very definition of political relationships-whereby one group of is controlled by another-illustrates her blindness to one of the most pervasive birthright reigns ever. We altered Millett's definition by replacing the word persons with beings and have focused our study on the use of language to efface and desensitize in the human/non-human animal relationship, as it parallels the German/Jew relationship of the mid 1800's through the fall of the Third Reich. We have categorized our findings according to Goran Therborn's Three Fundamental Modes of Ideological Interpellation. According to Therborn, ideologies subject and qualify subjects by telling them, relating them to, and making them recognize: what exists and what doesn't, what is good and what's not, and what's possible and what's not (18). Ideology operates as discourse, establishing these three lines of defense: first, arguing that the exploitation of subordinate groups does not exist; next (if the exploitation has to be admitted), arguing that it is night that it should exist; and finally (if it must be admitted that the exploitation is unjust), arguing that it exists because it can't be stopped. Each line of defense attempts to efface exploitation or to desensitize the ruler to the suffering of the ruled.