A century before Hitler, when senior academics and university students incinerated books from such luminaries as Jack London, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein for containing “un-German ideas,” poet Heinrich Heine gravely predicted, “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” Unfortunately, Hitler’s Holocaust made Heine’s words come true. Censorship, although seemingly innocuous, can never be without consequence, as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the dismal situation in North Korea shows.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 shows how censorship eradicates daily life’s variation. This unfortunate effect causes people to find pleasure in seeing any change--even if it is destructive. Montag, the protagonist, finds great satisfaction in burning books; he uses the great power he harnesses that determines what others are able to learn without realizing how wicked it really is. Bradbury compares Montag to a conductor, exemplifying how one person’s actions can affect many others. As the volumes were engulfed in flames, Bradbury used the colors red, orange, yellow, and black; the image of a python and flame; and the symbol of Montag’s helmet labeled “451” to represent evil. Bradbury applies these symbols to censorship, rendering the destruction of books nefarious. Thus, the suppression of information is malign.
In North Korea, censorship has crushed the populace into a nation of starving drones. In fact, lagging economic development is a notable trend among heavily censored nations, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea, whose wealth lies in oil. Of the 10 most censored countries, all but these two have per capita income around half, or well below half, of global per capita income. Even though most of North Korea is hungry, Kim Jong-Il’s cult of personality has brainwashed the people into believing the very man who is starving them is god. The broadcasters on TV and radio are only allowed to bring reports of how great Kim Jong-il is, while hardships and other problems are never reported. Radio and television sets are preset to receive only government frequencies and sealed to prevent tampering. Only the government and the ruling elite have internet access, while the public is limited to a heavily monitored and censored network with no connections to the outside world. Clearly, withholding knowledge is not only burdensome for the government, but also harmful to the economy and population.
Thus, depriving people of knowledge is both immoral and harmful to entire populations. In America, we often take our easy access to information for granted, while many people in countries such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Equatorial Guinea cannot even switch on an uncensored TV. Clearly, freedom is essential to a country’s well-being. We can no longer delude ourselves that censorship is the answer to anything.