Saw an article yesterday that stated that incidents of book burning are on the rise here and abroad, in part due to the effective networking online by the moral storm troopers whose sworn duty is to protect us from our own wayward thoughts. I felt very queasy after reading this, a deflated sort of feeling. Like, here we go again.
Book burnings and thought supression have never been a sign of good things to come, have always been the tools of dictators and fascists. One of the most famous was the burning of books in Berlin in 1933 at the Bebelplatz, a public square where Nazi brownshirts destroyed over 25000 volumes that they felt were antithetical to the German and Nazi causes. That was a dark omen of things to comes. On that site there is now a memorial to that event with the words of German poet Heinrich Heine inscribed on a marker. The books of Heine were among those destroyed and he ominously foretold of the results of the event with his words written over a hundred years before:
“the burning was just a prologue: where they burn books, they ultimately burn people.”
So understand my unease at the news that book burners are back and ready to go into action.
It seems so ridiculous and so counterproductive to the movements who stage these events. Book burning is a trait of the weak and fearful. Burning a book says that you are afraid of the whatever is in that book and don’t feel confident enough in your own beliefs and morals, or those of your children, to simply counter the claims with tolerance and logic. Demonstrate your moral superiority and the strength of your own character by publicly pointing out the flaws and mistruths of the literature in an open forum rather than simply yelling that it is obscene and setting it ablaze. If you can’t counter the books with logic and truth then perhaps you must look at your own thoughts and motives with a bit more care.
Just put down the goddamn gasoline and matches.
Redtree Times 
When you say, “Saw an article yesterday . . . “, it would be helpful to provide a link to that article. Links are what makes the Web a web.
I think your point was perfectly made without the link. And it’s also reasonable to think that you may have read the article in hard print…
Well said.
I kept thinking something wasn’t quite right about that book burning poster – the language didn’t come out of any “let’s light ’em up for Jesus” fundamentalist congregation I’m familiar with. I finally took a good look at it tonight and when I saw Dockweiler Beach (free parking on Vista Del Mar!) and the reference in the last line to Intellectual Cacophony I figured it out.
The poster’s almost certainly a production of the Cacophony Society, given to such other delights as Winter Solstice Human Barbeques and slathering themselves up with mud to shop Rodeo Drive. It’s a strange crew, a kind of Linda-Kasabian-meets-Martha-Stewart-and-does-Malibu lunch bunch. They’re just into burning stuff – Hollywood effigies, household goods, you name it. If I had to guess, I’d bet you could go back into their newsletter archives and find this “book burning” is just their way of having fun with last year’s Halloween book burners in the Carolinas.
Anyhow, here’s a link to some info on them. Pretty strange, but in a laid-back, SoCal kind of way. I first heard about them from a friend who lives out there. She ran into some of them at a gathering close to Topanga Canyon. She hopes never to see them again. As she puts it, a rebel without a cause is one thing. An aging hippie without a cause is just sad.
I have to admit that the poster used was simply plucked from Google images without any checking as to its origins. It had nothing to do with the original article that I read in my local paper the other day. This group that you describe sounds very sad, as you said.