During the 1930s, Germany's Nazi Third Reich embarked on a frenzy of cultural "cleansing" which involved mass burning of books, led by torch-lit street processions and condemnations from propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.
Is there much difference between banning and burning?
Maybe the only difference is at what point on the slippery-slope we are at.This week, the authorities in the Ukrainian capital said they were blacklisting some 38 books authored by assorted Russian and Ukrainian writers. The banned reading list will likely be extended in the coming months. Some of the censored titles are reportedly fictional accounts of political intrigue by Ukrainian authors Gleb Bobrov and by Georgi Savitskiy; others are serious academic studies in social sciences and economics.
Ironically, the latest ban on books was explained by the Kiev ministry of cultural affairs as a measure to block "extremism and xenophobia". This rationale is proffered by an administration that seized power from the elected Ukrainian government in February 2014, with thecovert help of Western state-sponsored subversion of the country's constitution. Not only that, but the coup d'état was precipitated bysniper shootings in Kiev on February 20, when more than 80 people were murdered — a false flag incident that mostly liked involved the fascist, Nazi-adulating Right Sector, working in league with the American CIA. This is the same Right Sector that went on to murder dozens of pro-Russian civilians on May 2 in an arson attack on the trade union building in Odessa.
The Second World War Nazi collaborators of the Ukraine Insurgent Army, who participated in mass exterminations of fellow Ukrainians between 1941-45, are feted officially with public holidays by the Right Sector and the politicians that now rule in Kiev, including the Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and President Petro Poroshenko. Recent tensions and turf wars between, on the one hand, the Right Sector and other self-styled Neo-Nazi battalions and, on the other hand, the Kiev junta does not lessen the fact that they are all motivated by a fascist ideology that foments bitter anti-Russian sectarianism.
So, for the Kiev presumed-authorities to now claim that they are banning Russian literature to protect citizens from "extremism" is anastounding inversion of reality. If anyone needs protecting it is Ukrainian citizens from the charlatans that now occupy the seat ofgovernment in Kiev.
The echo between what is transpiring in Kiev and previously in Nazi Germany during the 1930s is fitting given the close ideologicalassociation between the two entities.
But, incredibly, the Western news media manage to ignore that glaring parallel, just like the same Western media have sought to conceal or ignore over the past year the brazen displays of Nazism among the ranks of the Right Sector and other National Guard paramilitaries that function as the Kiev regime's storm troopers.
Russian writers like geopolitical analyst Sergei Glazyev can eruditely explain that the Western-backed impostor-regime in Kiev is aimed at destabilising Russia in order to extend Washington's global ambitions of domination in Eurasia. Glazyev is no extremist; he's simply putting forward a cogent analysis of reality. But in doing so that's enough to merit his banning by the Western puppet-regime. The same bogus arguments of "cultural cleansing" were deployed by the Nazi Reich. They claimed that they were protecting the "German Volk" from intellectual contamination by Jews, Russians, liberals, socialists and Bolsheviks. Basically, any writer whose research and literature confounded the Nazi ideology of racial purity, Social Darwinism and "master race".
Not only were Russian books heaped into bonfires by the Nazis during the 1930s, other internationally renowned authors were also targeted, including Germany's Albert Einstein, France's Victor Hugo, America's Upton Sinclair and Britain's HG Wells.
The Nazi censorship that began in 1933, following the accession of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor, paved the way for military aggression and the Final Solution, whereby all perceived political opponents and inferior people were subjected to mass extermination.
Noble-winning German physicist Max Born, whose family had to flee Nazi Germany, once stated: "I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science.
On the other hand, any assertion of probability is either right or wrong from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking (‘Lockerung des Denkens') seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world."
What we are witnessing under the regime in Kiev is quintessentially the same thought-process that occurred in Nazi Germany, when any dissent from "ideological certainty" had to be extinguished.
The Kiev regime might, for now, have "only" banned books, films, musicians and artists. Mass processions and ritualistic bonfires have not yet taken place.
Nonetheless, the dynamic is the same path to perdition.
What is even more disturbing is the way Western governments and their media appear insouciant and blind, or even complicit, in the rekindling of Nazi practices in Europe. The West is evidently hand-in-hand with a regime that is recklessly imbuing Nazi mentality on a dangerous slippery-slope. And all this on the doorstep of Russia, which only 70 years ago suffered up to 30 million deaths in a war with Nazi ideologues.
Given the West's own dark history of colluding with fascism and Nazi Germany in particular, we might be disgusted — but we should not be surprised by the precarious path the Kiev regime is paving.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
