ok but it is this simple - if the Nazis also burned incest, pedo and rape fiction, they were right to do so, and the wrong was in everything else they burned. this material should be systematically destroyed, preferably publicly. do you agree with this? if not, why do you support people getting off to incest, pedophilia and rape?
So for anyone watching anon has provided a most excellent example exactly how reactionaries use feelings of moral outrage and disgust to manipulate people into blindly believing baseless and absurd positions like that pulp erotic novels posed some kind of danger. No they were not right to burn those books and it’s incredibly interesting how you’re presenting Nazis and their Fire Oaths as more rational and level headed in this area as if those book burnings did anything good. You trying to say that there were social ills and problems in early 1920s Germany that were solved by conservative moral panics about the supposed dangers of youths reading these books which were then amped up during Nazi rule when Goebbels explicitly said that the difference between his censorship and past censorship is that he doesn’t believe adults should read trash and smut either like you think the results of this was some kind of net positive huh?
I mean, anon, Hitler also created a lot of jobs and gave us Germans the Autobahn, so what he did wasn’t all bad, right?
Bleh. Please go find another hobby than trying to find redeeming qualities in mass-murdering, war-mongering fascist regimes.
Also, you might want to think about what Heinrich Heine said about burning books: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well. “
The nazis didn’t burn “books about pedophilia, rape, and incest.” They burned books that had “Un-German spirit.” That included, among other topics, the following:
The works of “traitors,” emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new Germany (H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland);
The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism;
Pacifist literature;
Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writings supporting the Weimar Republic (Walther Rathenau, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann);
All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig);
Books that advocate “art” which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist (George Grosz, Otto Dix, Bauhaus, Felix Mendelssohn);
Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, completely destroy the principles of race and Volk (Magnus Hirschfeld);
The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of “Asphalt and Civilization” literati: (Oskar Maria Graf, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Blei);
Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field;
Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life’s goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life;
Patriotic kitsch in literature.
Pornography and explicit literature
All books “degrading German purity”
Specific works included:
A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
How I Became a Socialist by Helen Keller
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Outline of History by H.G. Wells
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Ulysses by James Joyce
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (that’s probably the “pedo” book.)
Mother by Maxim Gorky
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Iron Heel, The Jacket and Martin Eden by Jack London
Deutsche Ansprache: ein Appell an die Vernunft (An Appeal to Reason) by Thomas Mann
Monographs about Marc Chagall and Paul Klee
All works published before 1933 by Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, John Dos Passos and thousands of others
Their goal was to remove these books from the world, or at least from Germany.
There is no category of “evil books that deserve to be burned” that doesn’t come from an attempt to promote active censorship as the only way to a “pure” society. There is never “we will remove this handful of Bad Things, and prevent more of them from being made, and otherwise leave people alone.”
It’s always - ALWAYS - “now that we have removed those Bad Things… society is not yet perfect. Hm. I wonder why. I guess we need to identify the other Bad Things that need to be removed.”
“One of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider social aim.”
— John Dewey, Democracy and Education (via philosophybits)
