A Digital Fahrenheit 451

The powers-that-be are editing books to remove things they don't want you to think about. Does it seem familiar to you? - by Miguel Gonzalez

Frederick Forsyth wrote a number of Cold War spy novels. Several have been made into movies, include The Odessa File, The Day of the Jackal, and The Fourth Protocol. This is about that last book.

In that book there is a letter, from a Soviet Spy in Britain to Russia.

Extracted from The Fourth Protocol by British writer Frederick Forsyth. It is a fictious letter from Soviet spy Kim Philby to the Chairman of the USSR about turning Great Britain fully to Communism. The piece is full of very insightful and scary information that I can’t help but see reflected in our country.

Click thru for an image of that part of the book.

The rest of the letter is illuminating, especially the part how the Soviets infiltrated the British Labour Party ever so slowly and effectively it became a proper tool of the USSR. I would urge you to read it, but make sure you find a first edition of the book (1984-85), or you will run the risk of getting an edited version with that letter removed for reasons unknown, even to Forsyth himself who only found about this year.

That letter talks about how democracy can be overturned by zealots working for years to destroy a country. And yes, it does sound familiar.

People have not read Bradburry's Fahrenheit 451. That is because it exposes too much. Captain Beatty, in that book, talks about how it didn't start with book burning; it started by removing passages that were offensive to various groups. Eventually the entire books were deleted, because if you were made to think by a book, how could you be happy. (And so you were offended, or something.)

The bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.

Is this passage offensive to someone? Edit it out of the book. Do not think different thoughts, all the same thought.

This is what Bradbury himself had to say:

Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

And then there is equality.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. [Fire-Captain Beatty, in Fahrenheit 451]

In other words, we must all be crushed down to the lowest common denominator.

You really should read that book. (And the title was stolen from a recent comment... )