2008-11-25
“But famous people are…”
Invented facts, lies,… vegans do it all. They also like to present a usually impressingly long list of famous persons of whom they claim to be vegetarians.
This serves two purposes. First, they try to get away from the image that veggies are all ecofreak hippies, second, they try to convince you that with that huge amount of smart people living vegetarian, vegetarianism must be a good thing. …Or would all those people have lived without meat for no reason?
However, usually there are many people on those lists who never were vegetarians. Isaac Newton was not, Sokrates was not,1 even Buddha was no vegetarian.2 It appears that those lists have been copied from somewhere else without question, or that informations have been
Pythagoras was a vegetarian either,3 even Albert Schweitzer was not a vegetarian.4
Also, it is quite problematic to accept something a famous person does without question. Gandhi for instance comes from a part of the Hindu society that is vegetarian in the same way it is sexist and racist,5 and Albert Einstein once said, that “soldiers were murderers”Tolstoi it is said that he proclaimed vegetarianism, but had no problem that his vegetable dishes were actually made with bovril.
On the other hand, people like Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler were vegetarians too, besides criminals like Charles Manson and Volkert van der Graaf. Why those names never appear in such lists of famous vegetarians can only be speculated about.
Finally, never forget that the vast majority of famous people were not vegetarian, Immanuel Kant maybe being the most important of them: If the greatest philosopher of modern times was no vegetarian altough vegetarianism was known to him, this must have a meaning.
next: “Hunting is cruel!”
previous: “It′s easy to be vegan.”
Footnotes:
1: It is not sure if Sokrates even existed. How veggies can tell what he did eat remains a mystery.
2: Source: www.buddhanet.net
3: Source: sandersreflexions.blogspot.com
4: Source: www.schweitzer.org
5: Source: www.trinicenter.com
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