This article isn't very deep or informative. It does, however, touch upon a pertinent fact-the US has areas of EXTREME censorship, much stronger than many other nations. COnversely, there's areas of immense freedoms and openness...

Hasn't the US been around longer than Nazis? Aren't there more US people than Nazi people? I'm sure the US also has more boobies than Nazis do.

It's also easier to circumvent censorship in the US. I don't think the Nazis had internet access...

Well of course, there are SOOOOO many more books to choose from.

Enter the dumbfark. I'm not familiar with his work, what did he write that was so dangerous?

I'm surprised the common Yank knows what a book is, let alone how to start a fire to burn one ;)

Its an issue of numbers. A nation with more people, will likely do something more often when compared to a nation with fewer people. Next they will tell you we gased more Jews than Hitler did, too.

Good for them! Remember the old saying "think free speech, not free beer." As we all know, books are not free to make, and since books are made of paper, which comes from a plant, and grain comes from a plant, and it goes into beer, then books are the same as beer! This means that books should have been banned in the 20's! DAMN THEM! Now I have to go on a book burning spree...

why don't you genius americans try figuring out some type of ratio? Also, they may not have had so many people or the internet, but they also didn't have the spying technology or the technology to actually watch their people type as I am now, and they may be watching.

The Food and Drug Administration has been given great latitude in banning commercial speech, which is what the Reich case was. He made devices and medical claims for them that the FDA disagreed with. He was served with an injunction to prevent his promulgating these items and jailed when he violated it. The FDA forbids manufacturers of pharmaceuticals from publishing or making claims for efficacy of their products in treating diseases for which they haven't been approved. There was a case some years back when the FDA ordered the seizure of a large quantity of reconstituted orange juice that had 'fresh' on the carton. We've given a lot of power to an unelected federal agency that at times abuses it. This is the context in which the U.S. has 'burnt' more books than the Nazis.

After all is said and done, America still rules the world.
Yea, team!

We Brits use these obsessive behaivour patterns of the US to our advantage,
John Lennon got you to burn all those Beatles records and then have to buy them all again a few weeks later.

Buy 'em, Burn 'em, Buy 'em again!

They forget, though, that most book burners in america are nazis anyway.

Has anybody considered reading them instead???

I like it that because some guy wrote this story and managed to put up a web site people just ASSUME that what he says is true. It may well be. The US government, and I would say every other government, as done much worse in it's time. But the reason that governments get away with this sort of shiat is that most people, whether they read or not, are such goobers that theyt beleive that if someone took the time to write something down that it must be true. Has anyone taken the time or made the effort to check and see if what this guy says is true? I doubt it. Too easy to just sit back and accept what others decide to spoon feed to you.

Yeah, but the Nazi's still have the US beat when it comes to burning people. Well, maybe not if you count the electric chair at as "burning". Thank's to the good graces of states like Texas and it's wonderful good ol' boy governers (cough*GW*cough), I'm sure the US is at least catching up...

That was Journalism at it's best. Very limiting in the fact department and very high in finger pointing.

If you want a real free speech case, try the abortionist article (forget the name of the "project," but it had a shiatload of home addresses for abortion doctors in America posted on the net, along with hateful content about them. As a cause of this mixture, many doctors were killed by Army of God members). Now there's a free speech argument!

"Hey lisa, do you have anything for my Mobile here?" - Reverend Lovejoy, driving a book burning mobile.

and if I remembered that qoute from farenheit 451 something like "tolsky on tuesday"

Could it be that the US has been around a lot longer than the Nazi's?

"Could it be that the US has been around a lot longer than the Nazi's?"

There's a comforting excuse if ever I heard one.

The story at the link is true, although it is very sketchy. Wilhelm Reich was a German psychiatrist who originally worked with Freud in the 1920s. He broke with Freud because he thought Freud was too limited in his analysis. Reich joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in the late 20s and organized a sexual liberation front as a way to REALLY liberate the working class. This was hated as much by the KPD leadership as it was by the Nazis, so Reich was booted out of the KPD in about 1934. With the Nazis in power he fled Germany (he was also Jewish...) and rattled around Europe, being tossed out of various countries because they thought he was a pervert talking about sexual liberation. He wound up in this country, working in Rangely, Maine. He developed a device called the Orgone Accumulator (or Box) which he claimed could focus cosmic energies in people that would help to liberate them. Even though his politics had changed, supporting Eisenhower, the powers that be in this country STILL thought he was a pervert for urging treatments for people that would relieve their sexual anxieties (including not enough Boobies for those who have read this far!). This lead to the FDA prosecuting him, his works being seized and burned, and Reich being thrown in jail where he died (late 50s). A glorious moment in American history, there's no doubt about that. He was weird, but we could all name a bunch of people/organizations at least as weird who have not faced such basic persecution. Does that help?

Boo Radley

He made devices and medical claims for them that the FDA disagreed with. He was served with an injunction to prevent his promulgating these items and jailed when he violated it.

Actually the injuction that prevented shipping of the orgone out-of-state was done by an associated without Reich's knowledge. The trial became a mess because Reich decided to defend himself, he was a libertarian type who though government had no business in his research. With a real legal defense he could have stopped the ridiculous case against him, but his unpopular ideas caused quite a fervor amongst scientisits like CSICOP's Martin Gardner and the FDA went on something of a witch hunt.

Has anybody considered reading them instead???

Thats the whole point, why should this agency be destroying materials in the first place? For public safety? I can get Mein Kampf or the Anarchist's Cookbook in a couple minutes because of the first amendment but that doesn't seem to apply to the FDA.

The Comstock Act may seems like old-fashioned silliness, but its powers were invoked in the 1996 telecommunications act that had every netizen up in arms about "obscene" material on the net. Historically, Comstock targeted the spread of contraceptives and information about them. Nice to know this kind of thinking still flies in congress, well at least 5 years ago.

Hey Fuzzmosis, I need to get around to reading Fahrenheit 451 for my summer reading thing for school. Is it a good book?

Y.Dload: Watch the movie. It's quicker.

Depends how slow you read skwidd, it's not a large book. Yeah, it's pretty good, cept the ending sucks.

In a book Martin Gardner wrote on pseudoscience he talked about wilhelm reich, and even submitted the article to reich to look at (without telling him it'd be in a book on pseudoscience, of course). In an attempt to make the FDA burn fark to the ground, heres some info on what he wrote, quoted from "Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone" by Martin Gardner:
"Particularly valuable were Reich's early insights into the neurotic aspects of social and political forces, and his stress on sexual health as a prerequesite for genuine morality and political progress. According to Reich, happiness and goodness are the products of sexual well-being, and unless a culture is sexually healthy, all attempts to build a good society are bound to fail. The "change of heart" or "rebirth" that Christian Socialists and Tolstoyan anarchists find essential to political reform is replaced by the Reichian concept of 'orgastic potency'
"Orgastically potent individuals...are the product of proper rearing by their parents and society, or they are former neurotics who have successfully undergone orgone therapy. Since there are few such individuals around (outside primitive cultures), it follows that most political action is useless."
It continues to state what orgone energy is (a nonelectromagnetic force which permeates all nature) and it causes:electric activity during sunspot activity, the twinkling of the stars, lightning, cloud formations and radio interference. In 1940 Reich invented the "Orgone Energy Accumulator" which is like a phone booth made out of sheet metal and covered in wood (wood being organic attracts orgone energy). Later it was made by alternating layers of steel wool and rock wool. You sit in it, but not for many hours and don't go to sleep in it (however you stay in until you absorb as much orgone energy as you need, at which point you become dizzy and nauseated). FDA be damned!

The ending of all Ray Bradbury stories suck. At least all the ones I have read sp far. He is a depressed person I guess.

I don't care about the depressing, the ending just basically looked like that when he was typing it, he looked at his watch, saw he had 5 min left, and typed whatever to end it.

Jeeze what's the big deal? We've already got more books than we could ever read anyway! I say, we should burn MORE books, just to keep it down to a managable load. Allow one new book a day. Maybe one a week. There. That works.

Dude, this should be *obvious*

I grew up in the deep south. We had album burnings and book burnings all the time.

The stuff they burned was crap anyways.. (j/k)

---------
Smell my finger?

~ Pinky ~

They didn't burn all of the books, I read one back in the 50s or 60s, I was impressed with the cloud buster that he invented, I would have been more impressed if it worked.

W. Reich actually had a long conversation with Einstein, who , ever polite, told him he could not understand his theorys.

I think the feeling there must have been mutual

Our government isn't the only entity that censors. Now that most publishers have been bought up by three or four huge conglomerates--Bertelsmann, Time/Warner, etc., the executive committes of these companies now dictate what is 'suitable' to read. Citizens in our country are allowing more and more power to accumulate in a smaller number of decision makers. Support independent authors, artists, retailers, etc. Just say Fark you to all the huge conglomerates which dumb down everything.

Burning books? They should be burning TVs.

Time to kill your televisions. Feh!

But wait til tomorrow cause there's a great program about Luddites on this evening, ok?

where they burn books they'll burn people.

"After all is said and done, America still rules the world."

So did the Romans.