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It is time to elect a new world leader, and your vote counts.
Here are the facts about the three leading candidates:

Candidate A: Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists. He’s had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.

Candidate B: He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of whisky every evening.

Candidate C: He is a decorated war hero. He’s a vegetarian, doesn’t smoke, drinks an occasional beer and hasn’t had any extramarital affairs.

Which of these candidates would be your choice?

Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt
Candidate B is Winston Churchill
Candidate C is Adolph Hitler

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Of course all of these are misleading or inflammatory.

Second, the vast majority of Nazis and almost all Nazi leaders ate meat — even those that admitted that Hitler’s ideas about vegetarianism were “compelling.”

Third, I think it’s incorrect to imply that the vegetarian movement was coopted for evil ends. Hitler was very quiet about his own vegetarianism and did not advocate for it personally. The basic facts are in heavy dispute and what we know is from private sources. More importantly, you fail to mention the fact described in the Wikipedia article that the Nazis persecuted German vegetarianism organizations! Vegetarier-Bund Deutschlands was closed in 1936 and its members were sent to concentration camps. The vegetarianism movement in Germany was destroyed by Hitler (and not publicly replaced), not coopted.

I also think you (or the article you read) is incorrect in attributing Hitler’s vegetarianism only to the Wagnerian ideal of a strong Germanic vegetarian culture. Hitler was responsible for the creation of a sweeping Animal rights law in 1933 that forbade vivisection and unnecessary torment and cruelty to animals. This was decades before these laws were passed elsewhere.

That all goes to say that things are very complicated. Without acknowledging this, it’s unclear what we are supposed to learn beyond the fact that people can be compassionate and hateful at the same time and that not all vegetarians are lovey-dovey hippies. Of course, we don’t need Hitler to teach us that and bringing him up in conversations about vegetarianism is usually just another form of reductio ad Hitlerum.

Hitler was a uniquely pathologically twisted person. Let’s be careful to not search for too much meaning about vegetarianism is what is probably the most extreme pathological counterexample to everything we like to take for granted in the rest of the human race (and almost always can!).

But with that said, vegetarians should be happy to see Meatscape. Eating meat was something people took for granted 40 years ago. The fact that it is becoming a lifestyle worth talking about (or writing magazines about!) is sign of the first major victories for vegetarianism and the philosophies that will pave the way for it.