One of the ways that the Nazi Germans managed to censor and rewrite history was to burn the books of writers such as Marx, thereby creating a world where, eventually, Communism would, not only, just not exist, but would never have existed (for all intents and purposes). The technical term for this is Biblioclasm.
However, more deeply, this is the removal of free speech, and therefore, of freedoms altogether. An action which, whilst not necessarily fundamentally wrongful, is considered wrong in the society that I, lucky as I am, live in. Whilst tragedies such as the removal of the right to secret ballot occur in Zimbabwe, the amount of civil liberties I am deemed to need are relatively high. But who's to say that Mugabe is right or wrong? I would certainly hope that if there was a democratic, utopic nation on the Earth that it would not look down its nose at the shocking restrictions on freedoms experienced here, in Britain; detention for 30 days, CCTV and the potential on the horizon for ID cards. I would hope that this fictional utopian society would understand that this is merely a stage in our development, and it needs to experience big brother before it can return to Ancient Greece.
And who says democracy is so great anyway?! It feels good looking back on the
2000 years of various subjugation, but Aristotle lived in the biggest society ever to adopt frequent use of true (and by true I mean direct) democracy and dubbed it to be 'mob rule'. In fact, if the reports and exaggerations of Aristophanes are even to be slightly believed, here we can see the first truly recorded example of 'voter apathy'. Let's not overestimate democracy. It, like civil liberties, is good, but suffers from the addage of 'too much of a good thing'.However, we should, at this point in our fluid development of philosophy, society and politics be thankful for the opportunity to express our own views freely and be able to discuss without fear of reprisal, so that we may better understand humanity, and take a better grasp of our future.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Sigmund Freud, 1933
