The Greatest Hate Crime: Book Burning
In 1454, Johannes Gutenberg began to print the first book made by movable type. He put six presses
in operation and he set type for his most monumental task: printing the entire Bible. At the time,
Bibles were rare and hard to find. Even Martin Luther did not see a complete Bible until adulthood.
Gutenberg’s excellent workmanship paid off and his Bible was the first book ever printed considered
by many to be the most beautiful book as well. Each Bible had 1,282 pages with 42 lines on a page
divided into two columns. He printed 300 copes of each page and bound them to make 300 identical
Bibles.  In 1519, there were only 900 books printed in Germany. By 1521, there were half a million
Luther bibles alone printed.

Now German rather than Latin Bibles were published at such a low price that the masses could own
and read one without priestly interpretation. Within 50 years, more than nine million copies of books
had been printed, and book burning was no longer an effective thought-control measure.

Little is known about Gutenberg and not a single proven portrait of him exists, but he may have
looked down from the heavens as Germany’s first official censorship office was established 20 years
after his bible was printed and a local Archbishop pleaded with town officials to censor “dangerous
publications.” In England, Henry VIII required printers to submit all manuscripts to Church of
England for approval, and he outlawed all imported publications in 1529. French king Francis I issued
an edict prohibiting the printing of books in 1535. By 1559, in reaction to the spread of Protestantism
and scientific inquiry, the Roman Catholic Church issued the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to guide
censors as to which publications to allow. This Index of eventually 5,000 titles, existed until 1966.

While the European kings and priests were busy burning, over in the new world of 1650, the Puritan
general court in Massachusetts confiscated and condemned a religious pamphlet by William Pynchon
and it was burned in the Boston marketplace in what was probably the first American book-burning.

Beginning with the 1735 trial of New York publisher John Peter Zenger, however, the laws
governing censorship in the United States have been clear. Truth is an absolute protection for those
charged with making hurtful, damaging, or embarrassing statements about anyone or anything.

Zenger was a German immigrant who came to America as an indentured servant and experienced
tyranny in his new homeland first hand. Against incredible odds he succeeded in a world which had
regarded him as an inferior. Yet so strong was his faith in freedom and in the rights of man to form
his own opinions, that he risked his life for these tenets of a free society.       Zenger's Trial

During the Age of Enlightenment, more freedom to read material of one's choice was enjoyed in
Europe than in today's European Union, and this contributed to an intellectually curious society. But
soon calls for censorship arose, cloaked in sanctimonious prattle such as "preventing corruption of
the young", ironically a concept often cited in current German censorship laws!

Special Agent of the U.S. Post Office Anthony Comstock founded the "New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice" in 1872 and convinced Congress to pass the “Comstock Law” which banned
the mailing of “lewd, indecent, filthy or obscene” materials which included, among other classics,
The Arabian Nights, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Authors Censored
under the Comstock Law include Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Victor Hugo,
D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, and Eugene O’Neill.  

120 tons of printed works were confiscated and 3,500 people were prosecuted. This trend continued
when Dr. Fredric Wertham published "Seduction of the Innocent" in the 1950's claiming that comic
books caused juvenile delinquency. The U.S. Senate held hearings to investigate Wertham's claims,
and the Comics Code Authority  formed to prohibit  any controversial comics.

For all the blather about Nazi book burnings, they didn't hold a candle to events during the
"re-education" of Germans after their defeat in World War Two, and the greatest and least spoken of
book burning (and monument desecration) in History. The Allied consensus upon victory was the
doctrine of collective guilt: all Germans, young or old, shared the blame for the war. The idea was
entrenched enough that it caused no surprise when U.S. President Harry S. Truman refused to
alleviate the famine of the German population in December, 1945, stating : “though all Germans
might not be guilty for the war, it would be too difficult to try to single out for better treatment those
who had nothing to do with the Nazi regime and its crimes.” Apparently this applied even to babies
and young children. It was during this time, when German cities were in rubble, millions were dead
or missing and anywhere up to 20 million homeless Germans were living on food rations of less than
1,000 calories a day, that both the British and the Americans took control of German media to instill
a sense of collective guilt in the population.

The Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force)
had been fully organized in anticipation of victory and almost instantly embarked upon an intense,
well-mapped psychological propaganda campaign for the purpose of developing a German sense of
collective guilt and, using the American controlled German media, launched a massive campaign to
shock and subjugate the German mind. This including control over what they read.  SHAEF

Tragically, millions of German books abroad were destroyed in the hysteria of both World Wars,
and about 25,000,000 books in Germany were destroyed by Allied bombs in World War Two. The
Hessische Landesbibliothek, for example,  lost about 760,000 volumes, many extremely rare. Almost
every learning institution, library and bibliothek in all German towns suffered cataclysmic losses due
to bombing. The bibliotheks in Magdeburg and Bremen respectively lost 140,000 and 150,000
volumes to bombing, Frankfurt's losses in books from its main libraries were 550,000 volumes,
440,000 doctoral dissertations and 750,000 patent documents, the University of Munich lost 350,000
books, and a half a million books were lost in Leipzig's ancient book district alone.

Then there was unfettered plunder and looting of libraries and schools. But that was nothing
compared to what was to come now when all German literature found in both the Soviet and the
Western Occupation Zones was subjected to censorship. In the U.S. zone, it was regulated by the
occupation directive JCS 1067 valid until July 1947, and in the May 1946 order valid for all zones
until 1950. Allied Control Authority Order No. 4 stated: "Confiscation of Literature and Material of a
Nazi and Militarist Nature" dictated that all confiscated literature was reduced to pulp instead of
burning to avoid accusations of book burning! Unfortunately, those in charge of disposal often didn't
know Goethe from Goofy, and thousands of innocuous, even rare, books were "pulped".

The first such list of material was followed by three supplements, totaling 35,000 books and a ban
was applied to all textbooks published from 1933 to 1945. All such publications and materials were
ordered by the Allied "re-education" teams to be "released to the Commanders of each Zone to be
destroyed" and all books having "National Socialist propaganda, racial teachings and calls to violence
or propaganda directed against the United Nations, etc." were removed from all libraries, schools,
universities, research institutes, academies, technical or academic societies, bookstores, publishing
houses and even from some private homes...and then destroyed. This massive, haphazard vandalism
was carried out by unqualified people from 1946 to 1952, and many books were lost forever due to
careless storage and handling, all under the battle cry of making the world a safer place.

This was the greatest campaign of book destruction of all time and ended up being applied not only
to the offending books, but to poetry, philosophy, musical verse, calendars, horse books, books
about trade and agriculture, driving manuals, books about flowers, home building, barns, astronomy,  
plumbing, poets, tennis and books about gardening. Hundreds of years of German history and culture
were lost due to this arrogant abuse of authority, brazen incompetence and total ignorance.

Books about birds made the list, as well as books by Friedrich the Great and Bismarck and antique
European military history books. Popular children's books, including rare editions of the Brothers
Grimm, were pulped on the grounds that they "provoked violence." Everything about the Olympic
Games of 1936 was banned. Books by the ancient poets were pulped. Even books once banned by
the Nazis were destroyed! Sloppy handling caused the loss of the entire musical works of Richard
Strauss and several Gutenberg bibles were fried in this orgy of stupidity.  TIME Article

The British Library was so disgusted and frightened by German books that it alone possesses about
12,000 books the Allies seized from German libraries and institutions between June 1944 and 1947.
The US Library of Congress was so appalled by dangerous German books that it obtained over
819,000 Allied confiscated German books by 1948 and 2 million other pieces of German literature.
Congress kept 28% of the stock, including Hitler's private library, and sent 72% to the Association of
Research Libraries. Only a small portion was ever returned to Germany. The French take is unclear,
but the Soviets stole a lion's share, especially rare illuminated medieval manuscripts, but they were at
least direct: since "Germany started the war" they deserved to loot German cultural history. Millions
of other German books that survived the bombings and looting were stolen by occupying soldiers.

Beginning with "re-education" at the end of the War, Germany has continued the strict censorship
imposed by the Soviet and the Allied occupiers. Even today, using the "special history" excuse,
"nationalistic" books, songs and symbols are illegal even in private in Austria and Germany, and
Germany has been aggressive in trying to expand its own strict laws beyond its borders. Almost all
prosecutions of censorship violations have taken place in connection with what they term holocaust
"revisionism” or “denial”. Merely questioning an aspect, re-analyzing data, expressing a maverick
theory or trying to revise a statistic pertaining to this subject is lumped under "holocaust denial"
which is illegal not only in Germany and Austria, but in most of Europe. "To have failed to write
about a particular historical event in a balanced manner" (?) is a crime that can send an amateur
historian to jail and he will often serve a longer sentence than a child molester or serial rapist.

Thousands of people have been convicted of violating European "denial" laws and they are currently
languishing in European dungeons. Cases prosecuted under these laws go unchallenged even when
the convicted parties were pacifists and never proposed violence but were simply expressing their
opinion. In the cases of scientists, artists, singers or writers convicted of this offense, their homes and
businesses are raided and their work is destroyed by the state. Worse, the definition of "denial" is
being broadened and is defined today as "hard-core" and "soft-core" denial, the latter including
discussion of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany as well as the Expulsions of ethnic
German civilians after the war. Even liberal writers extremely critical of the Third Reich have been
tarnished as "soft-core deniers" when they came out with books discussing the heavy toll of Allied
bombing upon the German civilians in the war.

Canadians are now also paying the price for exercising their right to free expression. Their Human
Rights Act ”guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits
prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” and this has
been interpreted by the Canadian courts and Human Rights Commission in a such manner which
makes its constitutional guarantee of free speech pretty much meaningless when compared to other
"collective rights and interests". It is utterly useless in protecting free speech when that speech might
offend someone as this turns an insult into "hate speech". The Act states: "Freedom of expression
ceases to be a fundamental characteristic of democratic values when it becomes a vehicle for the
promotion of hate." Exactly how hate is defined is left up to the courts, bureaucrats, special interest
groups, panels and politicians. Books and videos of an "offending" nature are destroyed and such
material found by Canadian customs guards at the US border is destroyed.

Like European “anti-racism” and "denial" laws, the persistent efforts to curb free speech in the US
have generally been proposed under the guise of preventing "racial hatred”. The US, with its
foundations rooted in individual liberty, does not have censorship laws as such, but it is being steadily
pressured in that direction by proposals of insidiously twined "hate crime" laws with censorship laws.
These zealous efforts, however innocuous on the surface, quickly escalate into full fledged assaults
upon individual liberties and cherished legal traditions of free speech. The prosecution needs only to
show that someone became or could become a "hater" due to reading an offending book, viewing an
offending website or listening to an offending speech or song, the authors of such books, sites or
songs therefore become guilty of "spreading hate" by default! By this fancy footwork, an illegal act is
redefined from what one DID do into what one MIGHT DO, or more aptly, what one MIGHT
THINK, and this is followed by a mess of judicial silliness and sloppy prosecutions based on
emotion, politics and hurt feelings rather than respectable jurisprudence.

In short, with language straight out of 16th century religious heresy or witch trials, today's efforts to
impose censorship are in reality just an extension of an age old struggle. Only the names, dates and
stated intentions have changed.
"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race,
posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still
more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of
exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit,
the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."
~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Until the advent of the printing press, books were hand-scribed and existed in only one or a few
copies. Burning them ensured that no one would ever read them. One man would soon change that.