Trump-Pence Regime Beats Hitler’s Record for Censorship and Modern-Day Book Burning

January 26, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a reader:

Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

“During the spring of 1933, Nazi student organizations, professors, and librarians made up long lists of books they thought should not be read by Germans. Then, on the night of May 10, 1933, Nazis raided libraries and bookstores across Germany. They marched by torchlight in nighttime parades, sang chants, and threw books into huge bonfires. On that night more than 25,000 books were burned. Some were works of Jewish writers, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Most of the books were by non-Jewish writers, including such famous Americans as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, whose ideas the Nazis viewed as different from their own and therefore not to be read.

“The Nazi censors also burned the books of Helen Keller, who had overcome her deafness and blindness to become a respected writer; told of the book burnings, she responded: ‘Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.’”

Today, in less than a week, the Trump-Pence regime has moved to wipe out all mention of climate science and climate data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. This is because Trump and his fascist “team” consider climate change a “hoax” and the American people should not be “exposed” to this “junk science”. For these fascists, never mind that this is empirical data about the real world, summed up and synthesized using the scientific method.

Let’s see this for what it is—21st-century book burning!

The USHMM site goes on to say:

[in 1933...] “Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States protested the book burnings, a clear violation of freedom of speech, in public rallies in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis.”

Inside Germany itself, however, there were no demonstrations against this book burning. (See Why Did The Heavens Not Darken by Arno J. Mayer.)

Some scientists have announced projects to save crucial climate data on non-government servers. They are anticipating outright destruction of data and accumulated scientific knowledge about climate change by a Trump administration. The Trump forces have already threatened to de-fund the satellite system run by the U.S. that gathers climate and other data for the entire world. This knowledge belongs to humanity—it is not for some Nazis in the U.S. to destroy to enforce blindness, ignorance and their savage rule. What will we here in the U.S. do? This cannot be allowed to stand.

One good sign is this:

“Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial ‘rogue’ Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.” (Reuters) (See "U.S. government scientists go 'rogue' in defiance of Trump")

 

 

For full coverage and the current issue of REVOLUTION click here

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.