Bebelplatz SquareFlorida has been known for some dastardly crazy socio-politics but when it comes to old fashion book-burning, a second look is required. The push to burn the Quaran by this so-called Christian Pastor, Terry Jones, in Florida smacks of the book burning done in what is now known as the Bebelplatz of Berlin where piles of books representing a wide range of authors were burned. The book-burning happened after a law was passed in April, 1933, that targeted Jews as well as political opponents of the Nazi regime, i.e., communists and socialists, or anyone else who thought differently. Those of this group who were civil servants were no longer employed.
The Nazis used scapegoating to diminish humans and take control.
How difference is the actions of Christian Pastor Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center?
On May 10, 1933, the works of Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Emile Zola amongst many others, like Hemingway, were ravaged off the University of Berlin shelves and thrown onto a pile of 20,000 plus books and set to flame in an affront to make anything of a literate value solely sourced from an Aryan ancestry.
There was an overwhelming response against this book-burning by Americans at the time. Ironically, one has to argue that the response to this Florida Pastor and his congregation is bit anti-climatic. How could a group of people get it so wrong? How could so many not be paying attention? LOOK!PAY ATTENTION!! But then, when people don't pay attention and the conditions are of that ferment...involution apparently happens.
Naomi Woolf covers this nicely in her book The End of America. She, the Thomas Paine of the modern era, discusses ten bullet points that rally the take over of Germany by the Nazis...all ten points btw, are heralded here.
What allows this sort of thing to come about? Well, that's the benefit of history...WE get to learn it so that WE don't repeat mistakes.
The other Naomi...Naomi Klein, described a phenomenon that happens in societies when leaders use disasters to take their countries into a wild direction. Germany had it's burning of the Reichtag; the U.S. had it's 9/11. Her book, The Shock Doctrine; the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, describes the mechanism very well (listen to all six parts if you're so inclined to make the journey).
When you get done listening to both Naomi's, current events start to make sense....
As a side note: the biblical Ruth, in the Bible (there was a book named after her), after the death of her husband, had decided to follow her mother-in-law in her migration. Her name was Naomi....
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.
Thomas Huxley
* ...of all places.
