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I have never understood why anyone thinks the left burns books. The last time I remember people prominently burning books in mainstream conciousness was the Na
by sascha_sl 5y ago
I have never understood why anyone thinks the left burns books.
The last time I remember people prominently burning books in mainstream conciousness was the Nazis, including irreplacable knowledge like the IfS library by Magnus Hirschfeld.
The notion is so widespread among the right, Dave Rubin named his entire book after it. I have not seen anyone actually try to burn it, even though it is barely worth the paper it is printed on in my humble opinion (and the opinion of most critics).
- DeWilde 5y agoCommunist China and the Soviets would like to disagree.
- sascha_sl 5y agoSorry, I didn't want to devolve this into a history discussion. I invoked the Nazis not as an example of right wingers, but at the last prominently known book burning during which irreplacable knowledge was lost. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are obviously bad representatives for most (unfortunately not all) of the political spectrum today. Unless you want to include edgy atheists burning holy books, but that is provocation and not an attempt at censorship.
- freemint 5y agoThey are not primarily left. They are authoritarians foremost which use the names of Marx (very much not authoritarian) and Lenin (somewhat authoritarian) concatenated as Marxism-Leninism to justify very much authoritarian systems.
- sascha_sl 5y agoThe issue is really that left and right as politial stances are not based on a stable framework, and everyone can place every political system into either category if they really want to (as often happens when people claim the nazis were left wing because they used the word "socialism"). What's actually important is that none of the above fit well within contemporary US-centric understandings of "left" and "right". I say US-centric because some people center-left in the US would be considered center-right where I live - this is how fragile this dicotomy is.
- finite_jest 5y agoRecent example of literal book burning in Canada: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario-francophone-schools-as-gesture-of-reconciliation-denounced https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...