451 Blog

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a story in which a future is controlled by censorship, where firefighters burn books to keep the population from reading about the truth of things. However, Ray Bradbury's work isn't the only example of censorship and how it controls people's thoughts and actions. History has a handful of times governments and groups of people have censored certain areas of people's freedom.

Hugh Latimer was a bishop in England during the 1500s. However,  Latimer resigned in protest against the King's refusal to allow the Protestant reforms that Latimer desired. Soon after, Latimer and his friend Nicholas Ridley were arrested and burned at the stake. This is an example of censorship in early history that did not allow men to express their thoughts freely. Another example of censorship in history is the book burning in Nazi Germany in the 1930's. Much like in Fahrenheit 451, Germany was going through a major reform and government change in which much literature was thought was hurting nationalistic pride and German culture. This was a huge example of censorship denied the German people to read world literature and to allow reading what they wanted to. In both Fahrenheit 451 and Nazi Germany in the 1930's both had disturbing similarities with men forcing taking books and creating huge fires. Censorship has also come into modern history as well. In 1947, Hollywood made a "Blacklist" that checked directors and actors backgrounds if they had any ties or dealing with communist. If an individual was found guilty of this, Hollywood would refuse to publish their works. This is an extreme form of censorship since the privacy of a person is broken because of a government tie-up. This corresponds with Fahrenheit 451 since the government knew each person's background and denied them work opportunities if it was a problem.

Censorship in a whole isn't necessarily bad, however extreme versions of it have hindered humanities furtherance towards achievement. Both in the past and in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has used censorship as a weight or weapon to control the minds of people as a whole.