A couple of years ago I was in Berlin walking through a plaza, the Bebelplatz. This is where the Nazis started burning books by Jews, liberals, and democrats (with a small D).
In the plaza is a monument that recalls this period of anti-intellectualism. If you stand in just the right spot you can peer down through pavement glass into a miniature library with empty shelves. In Germany reminders like this – like the Stolpersteine that memorialize the Nazi victims – are everywhere and literally underfoot.
In the United States we haven’t begun burning books – although we have a fierce group of fundamentalists and patriots who regularly succeed in banning them from libraries and expunging them from curricula.
What we have instead nowadays is a climate of anti-intellectualism which regards knowledge as irrelevant, facts as inconvenient, civiliity as pretentious political correctness, and democracy as a plot by a dangerous cosmopolitan liberal elite to impose their foreign values on red-blooded Americans.
Only a portion of American intellectuals are Jewish, of course, but the American Right is using precisely the same phrases that its goose-stepping cousins used eighty or so years ago.
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