WITCHCRAFT RIDES AGAIN
Meyer, Ernest L.
Witchcraft Rides Again By ERNEST L. MEYER Books! Written by radicals, read by crooks In Socialist cellars and pacifist nooks. Burn them, burn them, burn them, BURN THEM! Roast them on one...
...The proof is that Mein Kampf, translated into English and distributed by two American publishing houses, was not prohibited here, but enjoyed a rather wide sale...
...Dark . . . dark . . . stygian dark In market-place, campus, prater and park...
...A special German 'sifting committee' also announced that thousands of other Nazi books and pamphlets had been banned...
...Perish in flames Lindsey and London and damned Yankee names...
...One reason, to be sure, is that our native "lunatic fringe" has its own native prophets and home-grown jargon...
...but somewhere, hark, The flames still crackle, the fire burns, The lightning cleaves, and the earth still turns...
...For the German need only lift his eyes from the pages and gaze at the blasted cities left as the heritage of Hitler to know the harvest of Der Fuehrer's demoniac dreams...
...Fuel for the fire, Heap them by thousands higher and higher: Heine and Hillquit, Sinclair and Marx, Breathing sedition In every edition— Send them to hell in a shower of sparks...
...Yet no American counterpart of Hitler gained a wide following...
...Termites thrive best in rotting timbers...
...Heil...
...It can come only by restoring a morale shattered by a maniac, by demonstrating through wise leadership and direction that on our earth democracy has proved its superiority over blind totalitarianism as a method of getting along together...
...Roast them on one side, blister and turn them...
...I am reprinting these lines in this year of enlightenment, 1945, not because they are particularly good, but because they are, unfortunately, apt...
...And such proof could be underscored, not by suppressing Mein Kampf, but by making the book recommended reading for every surviving German citizen...
...Dark in the minds that dreamed the pyre...
...True enlightenment comes with the weighing of conflicting ideas, not with the suppression of one side, and the flames from a pyre of burning books have never yet lighted the way to progress...
...Which means that we are signaling the victory of freedom of expression by substituting our own controls over freedom of expression...
...Hauled from the libraries, rifled from nooks...
...IWROTE the foregoing lines back in 1933 when, spurred by the command of the new chancellor, Hitler, a crowd of 10,000 filled the State Opera Square in Berlin and watched 25,000 Communist, Socialist, Jewish, and pacifist books being consumed on a medieval witch-pyre made of criss-crossed logs and five feet high...
...ashes...
...We loathe and revile, we spit upon, spurn them...
...All ashes...
...For recently a United Press dispatch from Berlin said: "Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, the 'Bible of Nazism,' was officially blacklisted today for German readers...
...Heil...
...If sick ideas such as those expressed in Mein Kampf became acceptable to a nation it is only because the time in which they were written was sick...
...The living thought laughs at the law's duress— And fury and faggots are powerless...
...Heil...
...The tactic is not only hypocritical, but it won't work...
...Yet its impact on our shores, save, perhaps, upon the handful of recently-arrived Bundists, was microscopic...
...The works of 2,200 authors were black-listed...
...Through all history, from Socrates to the warfare between science and the medieval church, from Voltaire to the tsarist ban on political heresies, ideas have never been successfully suppressed by censorship, Siberian exile, or the faggot-pile...
...Dark . . . dark . .. Dark with the hate that fanned the fire...
...The shouting fades, the bonfire crashes, The last sparks die in the smouldering stack, The crowd falls back...
...Books, books...
...Dark in the land...
...Einstein and Passos, Ludwig and Bonn, (The book-burning bee has only begun) Trotsky, Kalergi, Socialist maggots, Feuchtwanger, Freud—heap on the faggots— Books, books, Fuel for the fire, Fascism calls for the gag and the pyre...
...THE reclamation of Germany can never be achieved by means of a negative action like black-listing 2,200 authors...
...The economic, the moral, and the psychological climate of Germany in the early '30's was benign to any charlatanism that promised change and action...
...Dump on the pile Wasserman, Bernhardt, the swinish Remarque— With torches of traitors light up the dark...
...We were, compared with the sick spots in Europe, too healthy...
...Heil...
...given a sound, prospering state the buffooneries of Hitler would have been laughed off as the pranks of a mad paperhanger...
...Not because of the crack-down on the Bundists or farcical mass sedition trials, but because the time was not ripe for revolutionary change...
...We have won the the war against Hitler and his satan-ism, and in celebrating the triumph of morality we are borrowing the horn and hoof of the devil himself...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 43
