Quoting Matthew Fishburn’s Burning Books, page 44:
After the initial flurry of reporting, the bonfires dropped out of the news, largely dismissed as some sort of excessive college prank or saturnalia. Compared to the interest in the spectacle provided by the book burnings, an intimately related article in the New York Times less than a fortnight later speaks to the difficulty in reconciling the symbolism of the [Fascists’] fires: ‘Nazis Seize 500 Tons of Marxist Writings’.
Rather than the exhibitions of the bonfires, this enormous quantity of books and pamphlets, confiscated from both public and private libraries, was to be sold for pulp with paper mills bidding for it at the rate of two marks per 100 pounds. It is designed, the paper writes, ‘to make good Captain Goering’s dictum that “in fifty years nobody in Germany will know what Marxism is”’.
Compared to the amount destroyed in the bonfires, the planned destruction of 500 tons is a significant escalation, but this time, just like the rhetoric of absolute destruction surrounding the fate of Hirschfeld’s institute, it again failed to really spark much attention.
A week after the fires in Berlin, on 17 May 1933, Hitler, in full dress uniform, addressed the Reichstag and declared that another European war would be madness, but the German nation could not be expected to allow itself to be further weakened. For the international press, the recherché symbolism of the fires was eclipsed by the corrosive reality (and the infinitely less symbolic) question of German rearmament.
(Emphasis added.)
Creepy, but I am sure that plenty of antisocialists would still enthusiastically endorse attempts to erase the very concept of communism from existence.
This is one of the things that angers me about reactionaries. Many of them seem to think that if you get rid of Marxists, the idea of communism will lose it’s importance.
Motherfucker, even if you somehow burn all the books and murder all Marxists, most of their critiques will still be valid and you will see that theory reflected in the world. Given enough time, world would probably produce another thinker who would analyze capitalism/fascism and came to similar conclusion anyway. It kind of makes sense that nazis wanted to eradicate Marxism from their community, though.
Interesting read, please keep posting these.
There was an earlier near communist ideology during the English civil war way before Marx. That’s just one example that comes to mind. There are probably plenty of others.
