Frightening 041610

A new Dark Age is dawning, not in the old European world but rather in the United States.  It is ironic that a country spawned by the age of enlightenment should lead the way to darkness.  Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and others read the works of the ancient thinkers and those of (then) more modern writers.  From their readings they penned some of most liberal philosophical ideas of history.

Some of the works they studied had been lost to the Christian book burnings of the Dark Age.  In another irony, copies of ancient text had been saved by Muslim scholars and secretly by a few independently minded monks.  The monks faced church torture, death and excommunication if their private libraries were discovered.

For hundreds of years the western world lived in befuddle darkness without vision or ideas.  When the Crusaders returned from the holy wars they brought with them Islamic seeds that became great western universities.  A renaissance of ideas began to shine.  It was not an even flowering of ideas as church leader resisted change but book burnings began to decline.

Over the centuries there have been outbreaks of book burnings as oligarchs attempted to stem the flow of ideas.  During the 1930s, in NAZI Germany, bonfires of literature became ritual.  Many works met the flames only because some oligarch listed a title.  Rituals became happenings of excited destruction without reason.

In the 40s and 50s there were isolated book burnings in America as local oligarchy attempted to hold back progressive ideas.  American book burnings never became an inferno, as freedom of ideas was deeply ingrained in the culture.

That was then this is now, recently a Florida woman has begun a campaign to place warning labels on book she considers offensive.  She is supported by a Liberty movement and Christian groups.  Labels will lead to censorship and as this becomes accepted these groups will begin to burn a few books and then whole libraries.  Next will be the courts and constitution, which guarantee freedom of expression.  Independent thoughts will be outlawed, and oligarch dictated correct thought will becomes law as in NAZI Germany.

It is interesting how all such movements assume names like “Liberty and Freedom” and don a cloak of religious faith.  There is a real danger that this slow erosion of freedoms will ultimately tip control to a fascist oligarchy.  There are currently political attempts to censor newspapers, television and the internet.  The political ability to censor is the ability to control a nations’ agenda.  The first principle in staging a coup d'etat is to seize the media, the only message must be that of the conspirators.

Read and consider small ideas, while you can, for there are those seeking to curtail the peoples’ right to think.  The light is dimming, it is time to be frightened of the coming darkness.