Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction
by Rebecca Knuth
Summary
Whether the product of passion or of a cool-headed decision to use ideas to rationalize excess, the decimation of the world’s libraries occurred throughout the 20th century, and there is no end in sight. In her previous book Libricide, Rebecca Knuth focused on book destruction by authoritarian regimes: Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Cultural Revolution in China, and the Chinese Communists in Tibet. But authoritarian governments are not the only perpetrators. Extremists of all stripes--through terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other forms of mass violence--are also responsible for widespread cultural destruction, as she demonstrates in this new book.
Excerpt
In 1795, at the height of the French Revolution, moderate revolutionary Francois-Antoine Boissy d’Anglas pronounced, “France is bathed in book, both at the hand of the enemy and of its executioners…[It is] devastated by anarchy, suffocated by acts of vandalism, prey to the ravages of greed and a victim of the excesses of ignorance and savagery” (Poulet 1995, 196). His observation describes much more than the event of his times, unparalleled though it was in modern history. In many modern social conflicts, deep-seated strife has led both sides to commit extreme acts of violence, and just as often, the bloodletting has been accompanied by the destruction of books. D’Anglas’s sentiment in expressing the reaches of the tragedy resonates with Western civilization’s collective memories of sixth-century Vandals sacking Rome, Saracens burning the Alexandrian Library, Vikings attacking the Christian monasteries that had sustained learning through the Dark Ages, and the burning of heretics and their texts during the Spanish Inquisition. We carry a distinct sense of loss at these events, despite their historical distance, and we share the view that the destruction of culture is senseless and perilous to society.
More recent events have also been formative to our condemnation of cultural destruction, especially those involving the destruction of books and libraries. The Nazi’s book fires of 1933 (among the regime’s other atrocities) exposed the vulnerability of the very foundations of modern civilizations. The Nazi regime shook the world with the reality of how effective unchecked vandalism and unbounded racial pride could be in reversing our progress toward a modernity based on pluralism and tolerance. Though Germany’s book fires were by far the most well-known incidents of cultural destruction from the last century, the phenomenon recurred in many forms across the globe, and by century’s end a litany of pejorative terms had been cemented into our vocabulary. “Vandals!” “Fanatics!” “Fascists!” we have cried repeatedly in horror and denunciation. But by our judgments we have admitted an inability or reluctance to probe the behavior for a cause.
Condemnations imply that the destruction has no meaning other than to signify the presence of irrational forces. They effectively dismiss the destroyers of books as barbaric, ignorant, evil—as outside the bounds of morality, reason, even understanding. If instead we acknowledge the perpetrators as human beings with concerns and a goal—albeit misguided—of effecting social change, a number of questions emerge that usher us into the subject with clearer meaning and purpose. What is it about texts and libraries that puts them in the line of fire during social conflict? What compels a group to enact its alienation through violence aimed at print material and the institutions and building that house them? What do various incidents of book destruction have in common, and what makes them unique? And, is there an identifiable pattern to such acts?
© 2006 by Rebecca Knuth
Reprinted with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Westport, CT http://www.greenwood.com
Reviews
“Deftly researched and bitingly exact in its portrayal of extremist psychology and its terrible consequences…highly recommended”—The Bookwatch
“Knuth reports on the destruction of libraries and books by extremists around the world during the 20th century”—Reference & Research Book News
”Knuth documents how extremists of all persuasions have destroyed books and libraries …and concludes with a discussion of the cultural destruction of Iraq in 2003”—American Libraries
Author's Biography
Rebecca Knuth is Chair of the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii, where she is also Associate Professor.