Quote:
Originally Posted by Sybarite
I would rather think that that goes without saying, Eric.
However, it's not a good policy to cave in to fundamentalists and allow them, in effect, to censor literature (or anything else, for that matter). Once they start – and particularly if they have some success – they won't stop, and they'll want more and more and more.
And it's possibly also worth making the rather obvious comment that the Nazis started by banning books and art that they regarded as 'entartete' (degenerate).
They didn't murder the artists until a few years further down the line.
|
Not quite true. Historical truth sometimes thwarts these easy Nazi comparisons. Fact is Nazis were Nazis well before they came into power. They did not ban books then but they did regularly beat up "degenerates" and communists. When they finally started doing well at elections, they did so for several reasons, one was the divide on the left, if the social democrats and the communists hadn't hated each other's guts Hitler would not have risen to power. Another was that public rallies for "degenerates" (i.e. everybody on the left, artsy, jewish or homosexual side of things) were difficult, since the SA regularly broke up meetings and broke collarbones. They did not start with burning books. They started with violence, then, when in power, segued into creating a better public order by banning and burning books and marriages etc., and then cleaned up some more by initiating industrial murder.