Book
burning has been used as a terroristic threat, a symbol of power, and a
cultural cleansing since ancient times. In ancient times, when many
books were the only copy in existence, book burning was often a sign of
conquest. The conquering nation would destroy the accumulated knowledge
of a conquered land in order to install their own culture. Destroying
cultural knowledge became more difficult after the invention of the
printing press, but book burning continued, as a symbol of preferred
thought if nothing else. It was often a demonstration of crushing a dissension.
The unifying factor between all types of
purposeful book-burners in the 20th century, Knuth says, is that the
perpetrators feel like victims, even if they’re the ones in power.
Perhaps the most infamous book burnings were those staged by Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis, who regularly employed language framing themselves
as the victims of Jews. Similarly, when Mao Zedong took power in China
and implemented the Cultural Revolution, any book that didn’t conform to
party propaganda, like those promoting capitalism or other dangerous
ideas, were destroyed. More recently, the Jaffna Public Library of Sri
Lanka—home to nearly 100,000 rare books of Tamil history and
literature—was burned by Sinhalese Buddhists. The Sinhalese felt their
Buddhist beliefs were under threat by the Hinduism of Tamils, even
though they outnumbered the Tamils.Even when the knowledge itself
isn’t prevented from reaching the public, the symbolic weight of burning
books is heavy. “Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a
potency of life in them as to be as active as that soul was whose
progeny they are,” wrote John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, in his
1644 book Areopagitica. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature…
but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself—” an idea that
continues to be espoused in modern culture, like in Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451.
Read
accounts of book burning and its evolving purpose at Smithsonian.
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