"In order that animal torture shall not continue... I will commit to concentration camps those who still think that they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property" (Hermann Goring, 1933 radio broadcast).

Before you crunch another spoonful of that granola perhaps you wouldn't mind pausing to reflect for a moment, lest you forget that Hitler too was a vegetarian.

Yes, oh yes, the anti-Aryan-prototype himself abhorred carnivores in yet another manifestation of contradictory Nazi ethics. Adolf ardently refused to eat sausages or "cadavers" as he so called them, and was equally repulsed by the idea of slurping down beef broth, or the even more flavorful-sounding, "corpse tea".

In fact, the Nazis took great pride in their fervent beliefs in animal rights and avowedly opposed the idea of eating flesh.

This may seem hard to believe at first, especially since the average left wing tree-hugging vegetarian would assume no shared values with the average right wing nazi fascist, or vice versa. However, aside from the generally acknowledged problem of stereotypes, is the even greater problem of hypocrisy; and the magnitude of sheer stupidity that results when people swallow ideologies whole and forget to digest their inconsistencies.

In fact, one of the main reasons we suffer from political lockjaw is because each side bulimically regurgitates the same thing over and over. In this sense, it really is no wonder that the left and right make each other puke.

The Nazis were bonafide hypocrites to be sure; and their reasoning doubtlessly more skewed than a meatless shish kabob. Himmler for example, was dead against hunting, calling it "pure murder" of the "innocent"; and Hess even went so far as to bring his own veggie meals in containers while dining at the Chancellery, to ensure that his food contained "dynamically ideological ingredients".

So just how did the Nazis justify smoking 6 million humans if they couldn't even deal with frying their furry friends? Briefly, their rather limp attempt to assert a 'moral' position went something like this:

1) Meat-eating is a boo-boo because it contains the blood of lower animals, which in turn taints our superior human blood.

2) Jews are bad because they drain the blood first when preparing kosher food.

3) Um okay, we don't quite know how to rationalize this except to push harder for the fact that we're also animal rights activists.

4) Yes, we love animals and believe that the artificial divide between humans and nature is pure church folly.

5) Oops sorry, we changed our minds again; humans somehow don't fall into the animal category so slaughtering humans is okay especially if they're inhumane towards animals.

Make sense? Hopefully not. But my point here is that the Nazi's weren't alone in their hypocrisy or their complicity. World over, we rationalize and justify deadly behavior when it suits our needs. What is so bewildering however, is the righteousness that we exhibit in the face of our own glaring hypocrisy; and how reflections on our own complicity is often rarer than beef still on the cow. So my message to all you Nazi Vegetarians is this:

Stop feeding yourself self-congratulatory politics and take some time to chew on your own rigid ideology before you leap down (or slash) the throat of someone who disagrees with your perspective. Many people's beliefs are hard to digest, but there may still be hope in a world where a Nazi and a Hippy can at least share a salad.