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# Posted 12:11 PM by Patrick Belton

ON THIS DAY, THE BOOKS BURNED: As the NYT's editorial page points out this morning, totalitarian regimes always begin by targeting their most articulate opponents.

To wit, it was on May 10, 1933 that the Deutsche Studentenschaft der Berliner Hochsculen, a Nazi student group and front at the University of Berlin, burned in the Opernplatz the works of Freud, Marx, Mann, Remarque, Zola, Jack London, and H.G. Wells, as well as (Goebbels's phrase) "the trash and filth of Jewish 'asphalt' literati." And the concentration camp at Dachau would be opened within the week, under SS officer Theodor Eicke's command.

Such villainy did not cease at Nuremberg, but continues wherever there are not democracy and the freedoms of speech, belief, economic opportunity, and physical security. Freedom House documents in its annual global survey the utter lack of these freedoms today in China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, Somalia, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan; and despicably, the first six of these are permitted even to sit on the UN's commission charged with monitoring and condemning repressive governments.

And equally with respect to the task of extending these freedoms, and with regard to all those who suffered and continue to suffer their absence: we must never, ever, forget.

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