In a speech delivered at Dartman while Dwight Eisenhower was president, he said, “Don’t join the book burners.
Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. ” Eisenhower was telling people not to join the wrong. By joining the wrong you are engaging in what they do not want you to know. You are joining what they want to hide from you. He is saying that people cannot hide from the truth.
They cannot try to cover up what happened.People are going to know the truth regardless of what other people, the government, or society wants them to know or think. Burning the books means burning the true literature. It is burning all the truth that people may have never known and is putting lies into their heads.
Eisenhower’s statement has a lot to do with the Nazi book burning event and how it all started. It also has relations to censorship and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The Nazi book burning occurred on May 10th 1933. The book burning was a ritual destruction by a bonfire.
It was the burning of books and other materials that were written. They buried anti-national and reactionary texts that students viewed as “Un-German. ” This meant that the students of the universities burned all the books in the libraries that told the truth about such events as the Holocaust. On May 10th, they burned about twenty-five thousand books that they considered “Un-German. ” They marched in torchlight parades “against the un-German spirit” (“The Holocaust”).
They felt the books were unwanted and had to reason to be known of.They wanted to purify the knowledge of everyone and hide what really was going on or that happened. They wanted to control the minds of the Nazi followers and not let they have any freedom in the state of thinking or feeling or even knowing what they should have known. It was also known that they burned the Hebrew Bible because the Holocaust was not a part of the story.
Many wondered why have the people and historians forgotten about such an event or have not even wrote about it. This goes back to what Eisenhower was explaining.He felt that it was wrong for the students and professors and all those that were involved to destroy evidence. It was wrong for them to hide what the world should know. Everyone should be able to know the actuality of what goes on in the world. No one should be brain washed into thinking something different which goes into the idea of censorship.
Censorship was a method to regulate society and culture. In a way it was an act of violence to limit freedom of speech and expression. Censorship was an act to hide the truth and avoid exposing youth.Censorship was also a way to make everyone equal. During the Nazi book burning they wanted everyone to be equal.
They wanted everyone to have the same type of knowledge and wanted everyone to know the same thing. It was as if, if one person knew something that happened that someone else did not know then it was sort of like a sin. The Nazis wanted to control everyone’s thoughts and ideas. Books made people think and question and that is one thing the Nazis did not want to happen. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners were chained by their necks and legs.They were facing the wall and only could see shadows that passed by because of the light of the fire behind them.
The prisoners were in a cave of censorship. They were only condemned to what they could see and what they already had known. They were not able to do much and most of all not able to move. The prisoners were just like to the people in Germany. The society was censored and could not know the truth about events and was only known to know what they already knew and not have ideas from books in the libraries.
The prisoners only knew of what they saw in the shadows.When was prisoner was able to go out into reality and come back and tell all the other prisoners about what is really true, they did not believe. This could make a person think: what if a person during the Nazi book burning was able to read upon all the events that occurred and no one knew about and that person went and told other people? Just like the prisoner, no one would believe him because no one was educated upon on aloud to read such things that had happened. The Nazi book burning did not let people know the whole story of history.They were giving falsehood about everything. No one really knew what was going on except of what they saw for themselves just like the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
But Eisenhower wanted people to not join them. Eisenhower wanted people to understand and wanted someone to explain the facts and principle of what took place during the times of war and crime. It can never be forgotten. It happened and people should own up or take responsibility to it instead of trying to bury or withhold from it.
