Democracy As Fascism Looms, the Free Press Must Stand and Report in the Breach
It was a cool, dark night in Berlin on May 10, 1933, as a mob of white Nazi college students pulled thousands of “subversive” books off a large truck bed and threw them into the middle of the Opernplatz, a large public square to the west of the State Opera building. They hurled into the pile works by Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, Eduard Bernstein, Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich, and any book that they could find and steal that didn’t directly support Nazi ideology and that encouraged any kind of free thinking.
As the “un-German” books, many written by Germans, went up in flames on what was later renamed the Bebelplatz, their leader and ideological idol Joseph Goebbels provided the inspirational soundtrack. Hitler’s favorite general fanned the flames of hatred for the supposed inferior “untermenschen”—or subhumans—as the crowd of white students raised their hands into a Nazi salute with ashes floating upward between their fingers.
“No to decadence and moral corruption!” Goebbels, born a Catholic, preached to his choir. “Yes to decency and morality in family and state!” Then the Nazi chief propagandist—who bore a striking resemblance to Donald Trump’s ideological adviser Stephen Miller—carried on:
“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path. … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you, as a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death. This is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.”
Much more worth reading at:
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/democracy-as-fascism-looms-the-free-press-must-stand-and-report-in-the-breach/
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