CONSERVATIVES ARE JUST OPENLY ENDORSING BOOK BURNING NOW

[sheshe2]

Link to tweet

For those unaware of the historical precedents, book burnings have a long and dark history tied to censorship and oppressive regimes, most famously the one in Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. In 1933, Nazis burned thousands of books deemed “un-German,” including the works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and those of “corrupting foreign influences” like Ernest Hemingway.

snip

The calls for book burning in Virginia follow the election of Glenn Youngkin, who said during his gubernatorial campaign that he would ban critical race theory on his first day in office, and ran an ad featuring a local mother who tried to get Beloved, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Toni Morrison, removed from her son’s A.P. English curriculum. The mother claimed the book contained “some of the most explicit material you can imagine,” which is entirely true, given that it’s about the horrors of slavery, which many conservative parents would prefer their children not really learn about.

“What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack,” Nora Pelizzari, a spokesperson at the National Coalition Against Censorship, told The Washington Post. She added: “Particularly when taken in concert with the legislative attempts to control school curricula, this feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we’ve seen in recent years.”

[babylonsister]

1. Abhorrent, and where does this end? fyi,

article is from 11/11/2021.

[sheshe2]

3. I know the date of the article.

Librarians are still being attacked and threatened. One of the least confrontational jobs, checking out books in a public library and having story time for children and education meets for the elderly.

[malaise]

2. And there were DUers back in the day who didn't believe these effin lunatics

were and are the American Taliban.
Ah well!

[HAB911]

4. The title misspelled MAGATS

[sheshe2]

5. True

[WarGamer]

6. 2000+ years of book burning.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-burning-printing-press-internet-archives-180964697/

[sheshe2]

7. Thank you for your link, WarGamer.

What changed everything was the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Not only were there suddenly far more books—there was also more knowledge. “With the printing press you had the huge rise of literacy and modern science and all these things,” Knuth says. “And some people in authoritarian regimes, in a way they want to turn back the effects of the printing press.”

According to Knuth, the motives behind book burning changed after the printing press helped bring about the Enlightenment era—though burning through the collateral damage of war continued to arise (just consider the destruction of the U.S. Library of Congress during the War of 1812 or all the libraries destroyed across Europe during World War II). People saw knowledge as a way to change themselves, and the world, and so it became a far more dangerous commodity, no longer controlled exclusively by the elite. What better way to reshape the balance of power and send a message at the same time than by burning books?


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 aman 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.

[WarGamer]

8. that Milton quote is as appropriate today as it was in 1644.

Makes me want to read Paradise Lost again... been a long time!!!

[sheshe2]

9. Sad that 1644 is today 2022.

Thank you again, it was a very good read.

Sad but true.