My wife has drawn my attention to this well-written and thought-provoking article about the danger of book burning, book banning and book censorship in the internet age. If you thought that Orwell’s Big Brother was frightening, you ain’t seen nothing yet …
Book Burning: Is E-Brother Bigger than Big Brother?
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
I was reminded of “Fahrenheit 451” yesterday. I have been reading the newly translated book “Moscow and Muscovites” by investigative journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky. The book provides a wildly entertaining view of Pre-Revolutionary Moscow which covers polite society, the Dickensian slums, and everything in between. But his chapter about the heroism of the Moscow fire department contains an Orwellian twist. In a particular precinct the Captain supplemented his wages by using his firemen to burn the books banned by the censors and seized by the Tsarist secret police. Gilyarovsky provides a description of the cast iron cage where the books were
burned by Moscow firemen while the Precinct Captain carefully observed. The German poet Heinrich Heine famously wrote that nations which burn books will eventually burn humans as well. In this case, Heine hit the nail right on the head. After all, in Stalinist Moscow, the victims of the regime were secretly cremated at the Donskoy Cemetery and dumped three mass graves located nearby.