Idk why but burning books is one of those things that seems like a very obvious sign to me. 
I am not a historian, but if there was a flowchart to human activity being deemed good or evil throughout history, I feel like one of the main turning points in said flowchart is burning of books. As far as the flowchart goes, it doesn't feel like there are many paths back to the other side of the flowchart once you are a group that burns books.
symbolically i would agree it is very alarming. Where i'm willing to give these idiots some credit is that i think - in their minds - they sincerely believe that this wasn't a purely symbolic act, that they actually "rid the world of some filth" by burning those books which like, yeah, maybe in 1940 that might have made a dent in the total number of copies of that literature in circulation. But in a digital world if you think burning books is actually going to get rid of them then you might as well be pissing in the wind.
I realize that any rational person with a functioning brain knows that burning books isn't going to actually get rid of them or the ideas they espouse, but these brainiacs are too busy goose stepping on their own roasted doinks to comprehend that.
If you're making the argument that they aren't being performative but they are trying to sincerely make a difference, that makes what they are doing significantly worse.
Yeah, I scratched my head reading that post and tried to understand. Thought maybe there were some negative qualifiers (nots) either missing or inserted in the wrong place. I don't really follow my good friend's logic. Perhaps he can clarify.
Perhaps not my most salient point. What I was trying to say was that I was willing to give these yahoos the benefit of the doubt that, by holding a book burning, they were not actively trying to endorse nazism, which is what comes to mind for most people when they hear about book burnings. So if they weren’t, in fact, sending the signal that yes, we realize we are invoking a lot of nazi imagery and we’re cool with it, then what we’re they trying to accomplish?
At which point I posited that they might actually be dumb enough to think that by destroying books they are getting rid of the perceived threat. It’s like that episode of South Park where General Disarray tried to flood the entire town of South Park by leaving the hose on. Or like that episode of real life when a bunch of dipshits thought that by storming the capitol they could overturn the results of a presidential election.
In both the case of the capitol riot as well as the book burning…yes its very troubling that these wackadoos felt their convictions with such fervor that they took the action that they did, but the reality is that the rioters had about as much of a chance at overturning the election as these chuckleheads have at…I don’t even know exactly what they were trying to accomplish like, cultural erasure of Harry Potter and Twilight, I guess?
