Burning Books, Tearing Down Free Speech Walls, and All That Student Activism

May 10th, two days from today, will mark the third anniversary of the beginning of a study trip that I took called the March of Remembrance and Hope. With sixty students, two survivors, and an Israeli tour guide, I travelled around Germany and Poland.

At one of the first stops, we stood in a public square across from Humboldt University, an old and prestigious university in Berlin. We students were invited to reflect on campus activism and campus events. Then, we were informed that it was on that same day in history, May 10th, 1933, that students and professors came into the public square and burned more than 20,000 books. We walked across the square to where we could observe an underground memorial. Looking through the glass plate to the memorial underneath the ground, we saw buried enough empty white bookshelves for the 20,000 burned books.

A plaque next to the memorial is engraved with this line from Heinrich Heine’s 1821 play: “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

This Friday will mark 80 years since these book burnings when the student activists of the day were Nazis. This inspires me to reflect on the student activism on our campuses and the student movements of our present day. Do we think that burning books is wrong? Do we know why?

Recently I surveyed my Facebook friends asking: Do we know why burning books is wrong? Answers ranged from: [Environmental] “We have enough carbon emissions already” to [Libertarian] “It’s only wrong if you don’t own the book” to [Unsure] “Is it wrong?” to [Facetious] “Books aren’t taken seriously enough to need burning anyway” to [Serious] “Because it is not books that they are trying to burn.”

The last response echoes the Heinrich Heine quotation and reminds me also of this quotation by John Milton:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, the

y do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye

.

On campuses across North America, there is a current trend of students erecting free speech walls to keep the spirit of free speech alive. But these walls are consistently torn down by students and confiscated by administrators. Those who tear down free speech walls try to justify their censorship as acts that cleanse campuses of “hate speech” and purify them of offensive content. With the propaganda leaders taking to Twitter to say, “Not every opinion is valid, nor deserving of expression” we should be cognizant of this soft censorship and do our best to withstand it.

Censorship is dehumanizing. It seems that those who tear down free speech walls actually intend to tear down persons. Denying freedom of expression degrades human dignity. The way for bad and evil ideas to be countered and triumphed is with good and true ones. Without strong competition in a free marketplace of ideas, bad ideas will be wrongly considered and indifference is far more likely too.

As we commemorate the anniversary of the book burnings in 1933, let’s think seriously about the activism on our own campuses and remember that burning books and tearing down walls are only metaphors for what these actions really mean for human beings.