Self-condemned Nazis Need Insanity Cure, Says Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford, American author, critic and lecturer, made the following comment on the book-burnings last Wednesday night of the Nazis in Germany:

“The Nazis belong to that group of ‘hirelings in the camp and the court’, who, as William Blake said, would ‘forever depress mental and prolong corporeal war’. Their assault on literature produced by Jews places them on the same level of barbarism and illiteracy and stupidity as our own Ku Kux Klansmen. To dignify their actions with a protest would be absurd. Such conduct as theirs calls for the services of a psychiatrist. But since the Nazi psychosis, like the reactionary attacks of our American Legionaires and Klansmen, is a collective one, it can only be treated by isolation and mockery. For what have the Nazis done? They have put Germany today within a pale of their own making; and they are now more completely outcast than the Jews themselves were during the Middle Ages. No self-respecting, civilized person, much as he may admire the great achievements of Germany in the past, will care to enter that self-proscribed Third Empire until the Nazi disease has abated or been wiped out. To have reduced Germany to this abject state in three short months is the superb triumph of the Nazis. What can we not hope for in three years?”