Chapter 4 highlights the way in which vegetarianism may be understood as an alternative (to) religion. The first part of the chapter suggests that after 1962 vegetarianism is central to the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that no proper understanding of that fiction can be obtained without first understanding Singer’s vegetarian epistemology. This stands in contrast to the traditional view which is that Singer’s vegetarianism was only a kind of sublimation of Jewish dietary laws. The second part of the chapter focuses on Graham Greene’s The Comedians, arguing that the vegetarianism of Mr and Mrs Smith, which appears at first to be only comic relief, comes to take on much greater significance since it emerges as a powerful kind of surrogate faith – the kind of faith that Brown, the narrator, has lost.

The final chapter draws together the themes of the book. It uses the work of Derrida, Levi, Camus, and Judith Butler to delineate the way in which carnivorism operates as an ideology of violence; it argues that much harm against the human results from the way in which we misunderstand and misconceptualise the animal. It also suggests the limitations of metaphorical thinking with regards the human–animal relationship, and suggests that a metonymical conception, based on association and contiguity, may serve both human and animal better.

While the last chapter examines primarily the interplay between the ICRC and the RC Movement, this chapter examines ICRC links with the Swiss federal authorities in Bern. The chapter shows that historically relations have been very close, with early ICRC leaders failing to recognize that their humanitarian neutrality was different, or should be different, from Swiss political neutrality as directed by Bern. This failure accounts for a big reason, but not the only reason, why the ICRC compiled a defective record in responding to the Holocaust in the Nazi era. But the problem of too much Swiss nationalism, and lack of independence, in ICRC policymaking was evident before then, as in dealing with Mussolini.

The first part of the chapter discusses Serbia during the Great War. Following initial military successes, Serbias army was forced to retreat, together with the government and the royal family, to the Greek island of Corfu in late 1915. By late 1918, a recuperated Serbian army, together with its allies, liberated Serbia and occupied much of what would soon become Yugoslavia. Serbia suffered enormously in the war, but its domination of interwar Yugoslavia alienated non-Serbs and many formerly Habsburg Serbs. In response to the political crisis, King Aleksandar Karadjordjević introduced dictatorship in 1929. His project to create a unified Yugoslav nation had largely failed even before his assassination in 1934. The late 1930s saw a partial return to democracy, in contrast to developments elsewhere in East-Central Europe, a Serb-Croat compromise, and a move closer to Berlin and Rome. Serb officers and most political leaders rejected a pact with the Axis in 1941, leading to the invasion and partition of Yugoslavia by the Axis. The final part discusses resistance, civil war and collaboration and the German policy of reprisals against Serbs, Jews and Roma in occupied Serbia.