Fahrenheit 451

by Alex Linder

Did someone ever look at you funny for reading a book? Imagine a society where that look was law. That's the idea behind Fahrenheit 451.

Based on the Ray Bradbury novel, the 1967 movie follows a few days in the life of Montag, a fireman. But not a normal fireman. Normal firemen put out fires. Montag and crew start them -- to burn books. The '451,' which the firemen wear as a shoulder emblem, refers to the temperature at which book pages ignite.

F451 is a dystopia. Not a minutely oppressive, totalitarian one like that envisioned in Orwell's 1984, but a society somewhere between that and ours. Bradbury and director Francois Truffaut take characteristics of post-WWII Western life and exaggerate them to conjure one form the trend toward consumerist anti-intellectualism might take.

In F451's world, women pop pills and spend all day stuporing before the wall set, an immense flat screen perpetually projecting not Big Brother but Inane Betty, perfect party hostess. As Montag says to his wife and her friends, holding a party before the big-screen, "You're nothing but zombies, all of you. You're not living, you're just killing time."

The only men we meet are firemen, and firemen seem to be the ruling caste in this curious world. They wear hats that look like modified Trojan or Roman helmets and render their appearance at once serious and ludicrous -- exactly the right effect: One always has to take a cop seriously, yet -- who can take a cop seriously?

Outfit in antiseptic black, the firemen are part priest, part cleric and part hospital orderly. They are cleansing the world physically and spiritually by their book burnings, and it is during these burnings, as they pile the tomes to toast, that they expound their philosophy: thought is bad.

Books are thought concrete. Books separate people, give them ideas, make them different -- make them unhappy. So the general attitude of Authority toward them is Principal Rooney's toward Ferris Bueller, "He gives good kids bad ideas." So they've got to go. We want a society where everybody is equal and alike. Books make that impossible. So we must burn them. Book-readers are "enemies of the public peace." So they must be arrested. They are disturbing The Force. They are an example of Another Way. We can't have that. Ideas might give people ideas.

If this were Orwell's world, offenders would be browbeaten and tortured until they loved the system. In this matter-of-fact French film, they simply are deprived of the means of pursuing knowledge. F451 presents a world of Zoloftian listlessness, lifelessness and languidity, rather than Orwell's physical and bureaucratic torture. The firemen aren't really interested in reforming you, they simply won't allow anybody to deviate. Nobody but us 'team players' here, boss! The viewer easily will see the parallels to his own life. If you work for a big company, for example, you well appreciate the irony that Diversity must be worshipped -- uniformly. There is One True Way and all the others must be dynamited shut.

Montag is an interesting choice of hero. The movie was filmed in England, but Montag is a German name -- the German word for Monday -- and Montag, played by Oskar Werner, an echter Deutsche, looks and acts German: close-cut towhead, straight temperament, Germanic seriousness and vocal inflection. This is striking since the other actors all seem and sound English.

Whereas Germanic-ness is invariably a "laugh track" cue for evil in a Hollywood movie, in this Pinewood movie Montag is not evil, he is the hero, however modest. Although he dresses and acts the very soul of the authoritarianism he represents -- and he is good enough at his job to receive a promotion -- he has a reflective streak that leads him onto the little-beaten path of the Book People, literally and metaphorically. I take Montag to symbolize the modern West: prone to forgetting the important things in the quest to get ahead. Come back to your roots, says the movie.

Montag's deviation begins when he hides a book and reads it -- David Copperfield. He meets a young woman who stimulates doubts. He comes full circle when, on a raid, he watches the aunt of the young woman literally go down in flames atop her illegal secret library. Her life is in the books, and ends when they do. Living and dying for the "life of the mind," as more than one old gaffer has said.

      The closers of the American mind...

But burning books isn't the only way to go. It is a very crude and physical metaphor for killing ideas. It is perfect for film, which is why it was used. There are many other, better ways to achieve the intended result in practice. The Jews are experts at all forms of Idea Genocide, as I shall show by these examples of the methods they employ:

1) the Katyn solution: simply kill off the smart people. The Soviet Jews rounded up 20,000 Poles -- the cream of the intelligentsia -- and executed them. Buried them deep in the forest and blamed it on the Germans. Then covered it up for sixty years with their media. Jews are like that. The spread of ideas dangerous to Jewish interests is curtailed by the destruction of their swiftest carriers.

2) Create special laws that prevent the most intelligent from receiving the best educations. Jews take a quarter of the slots at Harvard. White Christians, the majority of the country, obtain about the same number of slots as the Jews. Jewish media hush up the anti-White discrimination and cry "anti-Semitism" when somebody like Pat Buchanan points out what they are up to.

3) Kill the vocabulary. This was Orwell's insight. Big Brother shrank the vocabulary year by year so that refinements of perception became impossible. There was only good and bad as defined by the system. In America today there is the Jewish agenda, the Good. Anything that threatens that agenda is called 'hate.' Anything that doesn't promote it fast enough but is still acceptable as far as it's needed to promote the illusion of debate is called 'mean-spirited.' Terms are devised by professional Jew Ehrenburgs to preclude legitimate disagreement with the Jewish powers-that-be: if you oppose the Jewish agenda -- any item on it -- they have a term to villify, ostracize and criminalize you. Every time the National Alliance passes out a flier referring to AIDS stats showing the huge racial differential and warning White girls about the consequences of the cross-race sex the Jews promote, it's called 'hate.' Every time NA posts a sticker urging folks to save the "world's most endangered species," it's called 'hate.' Not sometimes. Not often. Always. In every paper, metro or jerkwater, online or off, from Anchorage to Orlando. We are living in a society that is more closed to ideas than the one depicted in Fahrenheit 451, but because the book burning isn't literal, most of us don't recognize it.

4) Warp public education so that average students have a harder time thinking, and associate reading with pain. This is worth going into a bit.

What if you taught reading by a method that didn't work? That would have the same effect as burning books: fewer and dumber books would be read by mistrained readers. You don't have to burn books if you can make people hate reading.

That is just what happened. The Jews, through their control of Columbia Teachers College, and using gentile John Dewey as frontman, instituted progressive education in the early decades of the 20th century. The look-say method of 'reading instruction' -- teaching English by word rather than by letter; i.e., as though it were Chinese -- came to replace phonics.

What was wrong with phonics? Precisely that it taught children to read. Jews don't want White children to become independent, literate minds. They want feet-down, face-forward fodder for their broadcast amplifiers. They want White kids and adults alike staring dumbly at their Talmudvision for hours a day until the lies seep in.

4) Monopolizing the media and selling only your wares. So that those with different ideas have a very hard time getting their ideas published or finding works by others who feel the same way. The Jewish media system interlocks and reinforces in banning deviant ideas in a way that is much more effective than physically burning books, in part because the illusion of free and open debate is maintained. There is no picture of Jewish media control we can show you, whereas movie shots of firemen burning books make a powerful impression. Rows of statistics and a headshot of Sumner Redstone are the best we can do.

5) Stealing and destroying the few truthful books that do make it into the public domain. Jews are famous for "disappearing" copies of "dangerous" books, like anthropology works and scientific books on race by Carleton Coon and John Baker. And libraries these days buy only the latest illiterate bilge from some lesbian of color, some tiresome half-wit Jewess, some negro trading on his negritude. A cookbook, a Garfield comic, a William F. Buckley spy novel. But there are a still a few shelves that hold classics that speak in the old terms of the old ways. These get remaindered, or "disappeared," or simply discarded. Got to make room for Jewified, innuendo-laden Disney movies, DVDs, music CDs -- computers with Jewish software controls, to make sure that nothing teaching your heritage can be accessed by your children online. Is that what Jews are doing? You bet your life they are. Will you ever read about it in their controlled media? Of course not. Only on VNN. Until they succeed in shutting us down. . . .

6) And, finally, burning books -- literally. It does happen, though the Jewish media downplay it. The powers that be -- Jews and their lackeys -- will physically destroy the men and books they can get at no other way. It is that important that certain ideas not get out. Three examples cited in a Richard Widmann essay:

      1) The Historical Review Press

One of the first examples of a Fahrenheit 451 trend was an arson-attack on The Historical Review Press (HRP), a publisher of revisionist books in Britain. On November 5, 1980, "firemen" destroyed the office, warehouse and printing plant of the HRP. Damage was estimated at 50,000 pounds.(6) HRP rebuilt only to have the "firemen" return in September 1996. The offices were once again badly damaged by the "firemen's" flames.(7)

      2) The Institute for Historical Review

On July 4, 1984, "firemen" paid a call on the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California. IHR publishes revisionist histories of the Second World War and has dared to question elements of the orthodox "Holocaust" story. The "firemen" chose to attack IHR's warehouse and burn tens of thousands of books that they feared people would read.

      3) Ernst Zündel

On May 8, 1995, "firemen" in Canada brought their form of censorship to Ernst Zündel, a small independent publisher. Zündel had run into trouble with the authorities in Canada for publishing a slender volume which dared to pose the question, Did Six Million Really Die?. After years of state censorship, Zündel's home and office were severely damaged by fire after an unknown assailant doused the building with gasoline and set it ablaze. Witnesses reported seeing what Bradbury readers would have to call a "fireman" carrying a red gasoline canister to the front of Zündel's home, "gingerly like a bomb," and setting the fire.

Concludes Widmann: The message was loud and clear: Publications that inspire thought on certain controversial topics are not allowed.

"Firemen" and burning books? In one form or another, it happens every day. Our minds have been shut in a cabinet by the Jews. Our reasoning and our knowledge-store have etiolated for lack of sunlight and nutrients. The solution? The Jewish "firemen," perpetrators of the Holocaust of the White mind, must be destroyed.

I have a sneaking suspicion Ray Bradbury would approve.

ALEX LINDER

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