Artifact Two

Ronald Bruce Meyer."Nazi Book-Burning (1933):Religion and Censorship".10 May 2006. 29 Dec 2006.http://www.ronaldbrucemeyer.com/rants/0510almanac.htm

Censorship filters out ideas that are seen as obscene, wrong and disapproving of the government. There are also times when the government will force citizens to believe what they want them to. Sometimes the government will take drastic measures towards those who choose not to follow the government's standards. Sometimes, it doesn't have to be a person or a group of people. It can be anything that speaks ill towards the government, like a banner or a poster or even a book.

In the years before America was involved in WW2 and Hitler was just rising to power, the German government wanted the people of Germany to follow his example.

"It was on this date, May 10, 1933, in Berlin that about 20,000 books were burned during a student rally as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The suppression of free speech and ideas was a tactic of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. The target this time was anti-Nazi, Jewish-authored, and so-called "degenerate" books, but suppression of ideas by the burning of books, often culminating in the burning of people (as Heinrich Heine famously observed), is an old idea."

During this rally, thousands of books were burned that had ideals that were not the same as the government. Although most of the books were written by Jewish authors such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, all books that had ideals the government did not want people to believe were burned.

Even in America there have been disputes concerning books. In 1953, author Ray Bradbury published his controversial novel, Farenheit 451. In this book , special government agents called "firemen", are deployed to burn any books that could harm or change people's views about the goverment. The premise itself is ironic because the term "fireman", usually refers to person who helps stop fires and help preserve information as opposed to the firemen in this book who create fires and destroy books. It seems like Bradbury is paying omage to the book burning rally in Germany twenty years before the book was published. Both the German government and the government in Bradbury's novel have similarities that can be summarized in one sentence:

"We know better than you do what's good for you to read."