Fighting the Fires of Hate |

The Recurring Symbol  

Ray Bradbury’s introduction to the 1967 edition of Fahrenheit 451 recalls his childhood love of books and libraries: “I ate, drank, and slept books. . . . It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven, it is a sinful practice, and I carried that with me.”

"The symbolism of the 1933 bonfires has entered into the American culture of politics, film, and even television as a powerful metaphor of demagoguery, censorship, and suppression. Americans who depend upon free access to information have to this day often focused on the Nazi book burnings as a historical analogy to past and present-day events. For example, in the 1950s—during a period of widespread book banning in U.S. schools and public libraries—the New York Times editorialized that the suppression of books was a “species of book burning,” conflicting with basic American ideas of free thought. In another example, a U.S. senator, speaking in 1953 against censorship, used the term “book burning” as “symbolic of any effort to remove books from libraries.” “It matters little,” he stated, “whether the removal literally takes the form of burning or consists of storing the books in basements and warehouses.' ”