Many a dark and dangerous time in human history has censorship ravaged a country. Often, the censoring is enacted by a power-hungry ruler or group of people in an attempt to squelch a less powerful group. Hitler’s oppression of the Jewish during the Holocaust is an easy example. Americans tend to think they are above such dangerous futures and are therefore arrogantly naïve to the possibility. Ray Bradbury attempts to squash that naiveté in his novel Fahrenheit 451. In this dystopian future America, people have been blinded with flashy technology to the point they do not realize they are being censored from meaningful history, philosophy, and humanity in the form of books. The result is catastrophic ignorance. Censorship, Bradbury warns us, when paired with reliance on technology can lead to the tyrannical control of an ignorant society. …show more content…
According to an article on Wikipedia, they began censoring Jewish philosophy and science as a way to control the Jewish population (“Hitler’s Censorship” par. 3). This is very similar to the society in Fahrenheit 451. While there is no named tyrant like Hitler in the novel, there is a government that will burn any book they find with the people that own those books as a means of controlling an intellectual population (Bradbury 11). Censorship can be guised as a means of protecting a group when it is actually blinding and in some cases harming them. In the case of F451, the people who believe they are happily censored are in fact depressed and attempt suicide on mass