Anyone who has studied the Holocaust is familiar with the demonization of the Nazi Party’s organized book burnings. These organized displays of burning books weren’t intended just to be symbolic gestures, they were an actual attempt to eradicate literature seen as un-German, decadent, Jewish, or communist. And as Heinrich Heine said, “Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people.”
Heine’s comments were eerily prophetic, as we were to find out later. And for the rest of the 20th century, the memory of the Nazis’ actions in book burning were to serve as a reminder that censorship carried with it certain dangers.
That has all been thrown to the wind in the present era, as the left is engaged in its modern-day version of book burning. Cancel culture started with silencing conservative voices on social media, but it continues to expand throughout our society so that anyone who doesn’t toe the modern progressive line will find themselves victimized.
Now even leftists like the deceased Dr. Seuss are finding themselves the target of the left’s drive to cancel everyone who disagrees with them. Despite Seuss’s reputation for being on the liberal end of the spectrum, the left today alleges that Seuss’s work is problematic. As a result, Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to stop publishing and selling six of his works due to “racist and insensitive imagery.”
That’s an absurd overreaction by overly sensitive people. And, as you would expect, sales of Dr. Seuss’s books have exploded as a reaction. The only drawback to that is that the proceeds of those sales directly benefit Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the architects of this boondoggle. It would be far more fitting if they were to “get woke, go broke” as a result of their asinine decision. Maybe they will at some point in the future. But it’s good to see that the marketplace is voting with its wallets, and demonstrating that suppression of literature deemed to be out of touch with the modern zeitgeist will inevitably backfire.