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Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction
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. Cultural destruction is, therefore, of increasing concern.
In her previous book Libricide , Rebecca Knuth focused on book destruction by authoritarian 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.
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries is structured in three parts. Part I is devoted to struggles by extremists over voice and power at the local level, where destruction of books and libraries is employed as a tactic of political or ethnic protest. Part II discusses the aftermath of power struggles in Germany, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, where the winners were utopians who purged libraries in efforts to purify their societies and maintain power. Part III examines the fate of libraries when there is war and a resulting power vacuum.
The book concludes with a discussion of the events in Iraq in 2003, and the responsibility of American war strategists for the widespread pillaging that ensued after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This case poignantly demonstrates the ease with which an oppressed people, given the collapse of civil restraints, may claim freedom as license for anarchy, construing it as the right to prevail, while ignoring its implicit mandate of social responsibility. Using military might to enforce ideals (in this case democracy and freedom) is futile, Knuth argues, if insufficient consideration is given to humanitarian, security, and cultural concerns.
In her previous book Libricide , Rebecca Knuth focused on book destruction by authoritarian 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.
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries is structured in three parts. Part I is devoted to struggles by extremists over voice and power at the local level, where destruction of books and libraries is employed as a tactic of political or ethnic protest. Part II discusses the aftermath of power struggles in Germany, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, where the winners were utopians who purged libraries in efforts to purify their societies and maintain power. Part III examines the fate of libraries when there is war and a resulting power vacuum.
The book concludes with a discussion of the events in Iraq in 2003, and the responsibility of American war strategists for the widespread pillaging that ensued after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This case poignantly demonstrates the ease with which an oppressed people, given the collapse of civil restraints, may claim freedom as license for anarchy, construing it as the right to prevail, while ignoring its implicit mandate of social responsibility. Using military might to enforce ideals (in this case democracy and freedom) is futile, Knuth argues, if insufficient consideration is given to humanitarian, security, and cultural concerns.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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August 23, 2021
Book: Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction
Author: Rebecca Knuth
Publisher: Praeger Publishers Inc (30 May 2006)
Language: English
Hardcover: 248 pages
Item Weight: 531 g
Dimensions: 15.6 x 1.6 x 23.39 cm
Country of Origin: India
Price: 3344/-
Popular historian Barbara Tuchman's 1980 address at the Library of Congress illustrates the humanist's approach toward books:
She said:
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) 'lighthouses erected in the sea of time.' They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print"
This notion is a keystone of 20th and 21st century humanism. The welfare and future of people is linked with the welfare and future of books and libraries.
Like an article of faith, Tuchman's words have poignant and coherent reverberation. The torment in humanists' accounts of the devastation of libraries carries a sagacity of personal distress not unlike accounts of the destruction of groups of people (especially of children).
Books, like children, are objects of affection, vessels for society's hopes and aspirations, links between past and future, and barriers to mortality. While this analogy may seem far-fetched, the kinship between books and humans affords a theoretical scaffold for ‘libricide’, the regime-sponsored, ideologically driven destruction of books and libraries, that is illuminating and meaningful.
Libricide, in fact, shares the same theoretical universe as ‘genocide’, government-authorized mass slaughter that is the most horrendous aspect of 20th century political history.
This book asserts that regimes that commit genocide also annihilate the material expressions of their victims' culture, books and libraries.
Ancient libraries characteristically existed to support the government officials, religious elites, and rulers who claimed legitimacy on religious grounds. The connection between ‘written texts’ and ‘religion’ has continued throughout history. For instance, the Hebrews carried their national library in the mobile Ark of the Covenant; the Christian and Muslim religions both remain greatly dependent on written texts.
Throughout history, texts and libraries have played an important role in preserving religious and dynastic records and in supporting the activities involved in running an empire. This role expanded as collections became support structures for scholarship and other intellectual activities of advanced civilizations.
Our ability to construct a history of libraries in classical Greece (between the 6th sixth century B.C. and the third century A.D.) is hindered by the lack of physical remains. However, we can extrapolate from the individual accounts of scholars with libraries that perhaps early academic libraries existed and that the official collections of definitive copies of Greek plays may have served as the first rudimentary public libraries.
Judging by the vast number of written works produced by the Greeks (only ten percent of which survives today), historians tend to assume that libraries were omnipresent.
The greatest Greek library was, of course, the Alexandrian Library in Egypt, founded around 300 B.C. and later destroyed successively with perhaps the last section burning in 642 A.D. Staffed by outstanding librarians and scholars, the collection must have included most of the literature of that period; and, certainly, its collections and scholars deeply affected the scholarship of the time and after— the origins of liberal critical scholarship lie here.
Its founders were visionaries of "the prototype of the great national, or universal, libraries of modern times".
As empires rose and fell, the conditions surrounding the destruction of libraries classically followed one of three major patterns:
1) Some libraries were lost almost incidentally as part of the generalized ravaging of captured cities, palaces, and temples. Their demolition occurred as part of a ritual in which the enemy's cities were annihilated in the heat of battle, or as a price exacted for losing the war; such destruction reinforced the power and control of the victor.
2) As texts came to be seen as priceless pieces of property, a second pattern emerged: In war, libraries and books became "loot" and were carried away at the privilege of the victor. The removal of whole libraries displayed ascendancy in a new and different way from destroying them —the conquered people were disgraced, while the status and cultural patrimony of the conquering society was further enhanced.
3) A third pattern evolved under religious or ideological mandates that labeled certain materials unpleasant and called for censorship through aggressive purging, or selective destruction.
The systematic destruction of books and libraries illustrates the reality that barbarism and the threat of civilization's breakdown cannot be consigned to history books — a realization that only compounds the trauma for contemporary societies.
*The disintegration of Yugoslavia shattered international complacency in an abrupt demonstration that "the terrible European past remained a part, a potential, of the European present". The agent — in this case, the Serbs — tried to destroy a people "by obliterating all records, monuments of the past, creative works, and fruits of the heart written down in books or engraved in stone".
*In Bosnia, when the material artifacts of Muslim presence were expunged, multiculturalism—"the singular, defining character of Bosnia itself—was also under attack.
*In 20th century Asia, the Communists also took ideology to the brink. The Chinese attacked all that was traditional in their own civilization and, in Tibet, launched campaigns against Buddhism and its texts as part of a generalized assault on the independent and cohesive Tibetan civilization.
*In Cambodia, radicals under Pol Pot denied all modern structures of recorded knowledge, dumping books as if they were waste materials, smashing eyeglasses, and killing all those who could read. Such fanatical attacks on the fabric of modernity compromised the identity and security of millions of human beings.
The author of this book asks two principal questions:
a) What really distinguishes those who bemoan the destruction of books and libraries from those who enthusiastically, even ecstatically, throw books into the fires? and
b) How can the ideals of human progress be reconciled with the mass violence and obliteration of culture that characterized the 20th century?
To establish a simple sense of this dynamic, the author bgins in Chapter 1 with an investigation of reactions to book devastation, building a case that libricide exists, and establishing its connection with genocide and ethnocide.
Chapter 2 discusses the fruition and functions of libraries and links libraries to history, collective memory, belief systems, nationalism, and societal development.
In Chapter 3 the stage is set for the five case studies by the proposal of a theoretical framework for libricide in which beliefs, co-opted by extremists and transformed into ideologies; decrease the identification of textual materials as tools of the enemy or as enemies themselves. The trigger factors that set off common patterns worldwide are identified.
Chapters 4 through 8 contain cases that were selected to display the viability of the framework and illustrate the dynamics of such destruction: libricides committed by Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Chinese Communists in Tibet.
The author’s choice of these cases, according to her, was influenced by access to source materials, issues of geographical and political representation, and the ability of the case to advance understanding of the perpetrators' motivation and demonstrate the varying permutations of the phenomenon.
Nazi Germany was selected because it is the prototypical case of libricide by a racist, right-wing, and nationalist agent; also, a plethora of materials was available.
Each case history in this book has demonstrated that extremists have targeted texts both as the material embodiment of specific enemies and as symbols of broader antithetical forces: the spread of cosmopolitanism, democracy, humanism, internationalism, and processes of secularization.
What is the singular message that this book conveys?
The book teaches us that preserving the libraries of the world is ‘preserving witness to the greatness of mankind’. The collection of countless masterpieces — from which, nonetheless, so many are missing — invokes up in the imagination all the world's masterpieces.
As long as it holds any books at all, a library symbolizes the whole of human knowledge, and with that infinitely precious legacy, the possibility for progress and human transcendence.
A classic read. I was swept off my feet almost.
Author: Rebecca Knuth
Publisher: Praeger Publishers Inc (30 May 2006)
Language: English
Hardcover: 248 pages
Item Weight: 531 g
Dimensions: 15.6 x 1.6 x 23.39 cm
Country of Origin: India
Price: 3344/-
Popular historian Barbara Tuchman's 1980 address at the Library of Congress illustrates the humanist's approach toward books:
She said:
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) 'lighthouses erected in the sea of time.' They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print"
This notion is a keystone of 20th and 21st century humanism. The welfare and future of people is linked with the welfare and future of books and libraries.
Like an article of faith, Tuchman's words have poignant and coherent reverberation. The torment in humanists' accounts of the devastation of libraries carries a sagacity of personal distress not unlike accounts of the destruction of groups of people (especially of children).
Books, like children, are objects of affection, vessels for society's hopes and aspirations, links between past and future, and barriers to mortality. While this analogy may seem far-fetched, the kinship between books and humans affords a theoretical scaffold for ‘libricide’, the regime-sponsored, ideologically driven destruction of books and libraries, that is illuminating and meaningful.
Libricide, in fact, shares the same theoretical universe as ‘genocide’, government-authorized mass slaughter that is the most horrendous aspect of 20th century political history.
This book asserts that regimes that commit genocide also annihilate the material expressions of their victims' culture, books and libraries.
Ancient libraries characteristically existed to support the government officials, religious elites, and rulers who claimed legitimacy on religious grounds. The connection between ‘written texts’ and ‘religion’ has continued throughout history. For instance, the Hebrews carried their national library in the mobile Ark of the Covenant; the Christian and Muslim religions both remain greatly dependent on written texts.
Throughout history, texts and libraries have played an important role in preserving religious and dynastic records and in supporting the activities involved in running an empire. This role expanded as collections became support structures for scholarship and other intellectual activities of advanced civilizations.
Our ability to construct a history of libraries in classical Greece (between the 6th sixth century B.C. and the third century A.D.) is hindered by the lack of physical remains. However, we can extrapolate from the individual accounts of scholars with libraries that perhaps early academic libraries existed and that the official collections of definitive copies of Greek plays may have served as the first rudimentary public libraries.
Judging by the vast number of written works produced by the Greeks (only ten percent of which survives today), historians tend to assume that libraries were omnipresent.
The greatest Greek library was, of course, the Alexandrian Library in Egypt, founded around 300 B.C. and later destroyed successively with perhaps the last section burning in 642 A.D. Staffed by outstanding librarians and scholars, the collection must have included most of the literature of that period; and, certainly, its collections and scholars deeply affected the scholarship of the time and after— the origins of liberal critical scholarship lie here.
Its founders were visionaries of "the prototype of the great national, or universal, libraries of modern times".
As empires rose and fell, the conditions surrounding the destruction of libraries classically followed one of three major patterns:
1) Some libraries were lost almost incidentally as part of the generalized ravaging of captured cities, palaces, and temples. Their demolition occurred as part of a ritual in which the enemy's cities were annihilated in the heat of battle, or as a price exacted for losing the war; such destruction reinforced the power and control of the victor.
2) As texts came to be seen as priceless pieces of property, a second pattern emerged: In war, libraries and books became "loot" and were carried away at the privilege of the victor. The removal of whole libraries displayed ascendancy in a new and different way from destroying them —the conquered people were disgraced, while the status and cultural patrimony of the conquering society was further enhanced.
3) A third pattern evolved under religious or ideological mandates that labeled certain materials unpleasant and called for censorship through aggressive purging, or selective destruction.
The systematic destruction of books and libraries illustrates the reality that barbarism and the threat of civilization's breakdown cannot be consigned to history books — a realization that only compounds the trauma for contemporary societies.
*The disintegration of Yugoslavia shattered international complacency in an abrupt demonstration that "the terrible European past remained a part, a potential, of the European present". The agent — in this case, the Serbs — tried to destroy a people "by obliterating all records, monuments of the past, creative works, and fruits of the heart written down in books or engraved in stone".
*In Bosnia, when the material artifacts of Muslim presence were expunged, multiculturalism—"the singular, defining character of Bosnia itself—was also under attack.
*In 20th century Asia, the Communists also took ideology to the brink. The Chinese attacked all that was traditional in their own civilization and, in Tibet, launched campaigns against Buddhism and its texts as part of a generalized assault on the independent and cohesive Tibetan civilization.
*In Cambodia, radicals under Pol Pot denied all modern structures of recorded knowledge, dumping books as if they were waste materials, smashing eyeglasses, and killing all those who could read. Such fanatical attacks on the fabric of modernity compromised the identity and security of millions of human beings.
The author of this book asks two principal questions:
a) What really distinguishes those who bemoan the destruction of books and libraries from those who enthusiastically, even ecstatically, throw books into the fires? and
b) How can the ideals of human progress be reconciled with the mass violence and obliteration of culture that characterized the 20th century?
To establish a simple sense of this dynamic, the author bgins in Chapter 1 with an investigation of reactions to book devastation, building a case that libricide exists, and establishing its connection with genocide and ethnocide.
Chapter 2 discusses the fruition and functions of libraries and links libraries to history, collective memory, belief systems, nationalism, and societal development.
In Chapter 3 the stage is set for the five case studies by the proposal of a theoretical framework for libricide in which beliefs, co-opted by extremists and transformed into ideologies; decrease the identification of textual materials as tools of the enemy or as enemies themselves. The trigger factors that set off common patterns worldwide are identified.
Chapters 4 through 8 contain cases that were selected to display the viability of the framework and illustrate the dynamics of such destruction: libricides committed by Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Chinese Communists in Tibet.
The author’s choice of these cases, according to her, was influenced by access to source materials, issues of geographical and political representation, and the ability of the case to advance understanding of the perpetrators' motivation and demonstrate the varying permutations of the phenomenon.
Nazi Germany was selected because it is the prototypical case of libricide by a racist, right-wing, and nationalist agent; also, a plethora of materials was available.
Each case history in this book has demonstrated that extremists have targeted texts both as the material embodiment of specific enemies and as symbols of broader antithetical forces: the spread of cosmopolitanism, democracy, humanism, internationalism, and processes of secularization.
What is the singular message that this book conveys?
The book teaches us that preserving the libraries of the world is ‘preserving witness to the greatness of mankind’. The collection of countless masterpieces — from which, nonetheless, so many are missing — invokes up in the imagination all the world's masterpieces.
As long as it holds any books at all, a library symbolizes the whole of human knowledge, and with that infinitely precious legacy, the possibility for progress and human transcendence.
A classic read. I was swept off my feet almost.
June 16, 2013
A natural book for Goodreaders. I'll never forget seeing the plaque in the square in Frankfurt commorating the burning of the books there by the Nazis. This book brings out some amazing details of historical events that resulted in destruction of libraries. One recent example was the terrible destruction of libraries and cultural heritage in Iraq. We were warned by many organizations to safeguard them but that wasn't part of the plan unfortunately. The story of the destruction of the centuries old library at the university in Louvain, Belgium in 1914 by the Germans was the first modern event and she deftly brings out the progression of library and cultural destruction after that event. The background story of the bombing of Dresden is very interesting.
If you love books you will very much appreciate this book I found wandering in the stacks of WNMU library.
If you love books you will very much appreciate this book I found wandering in the stacks of WNMU library.
February 27, 2021
I really enjoy books with liberal values and this book amazed me. Learned a lot of facts and stories from here.
December 24, 2013
Rebecca Knuth's book is incredibly well researched and presented. Every library should make this available to readers as it shows the cultural, educational and societal implication of a library being burned in this so called 'civilized' era...
As someone who has friends in both communities in Sri Lanka, I wondered why a government would 'intentionally' burn the library of its citizens? 90,000+ irreplaceable volumes? Many of them original? This book gave me a lot of answers that as it well researched and presented with facts.
Pg 84 of her Knuth's book clearly states:
Late on the 31st night, eyewitnesses saw uniformed police and Sinhalese gang members set fire to the Jaffna Public Library (Peris 2001). Two Sinhalese Cabinet members who watched it burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House claimed that it was “an ‘unfortunate incident,’ where a ‘few’ policeman ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree,’ all on their own” (“Remembering the Jaffna” 2001).
(Editor's note: It was obvious that even 'educated' sinhalese politicians who were not following true Buddhism, suppressed the other Sinhalese, and created an 'imagined threat' of Tamils, just like Nazis imagined the Jews as a threat and burned their library?!)
As someone who has friends in both communities in Sri Lanka, I wondered why a government would 'intentionally' burn the library of its citizens? 90,000+ irreplaceable volumes? Many of them original? This book gave me a lot of answers that as it well researched and presented with facts.
Pg 84 of her Knuth's book clearly states:
Late on the 31st night, eyewitnesses saw uniformed police and Sinhalese gang members set fire to the Jaffna Public Library (Peris 2001). Two Sinhalese Cabinet members who watched it burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House claimed that it was “an ‘unfortunate incident,’ where a ‘few’ policeman ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree,’ all on their own” (“Remembering the Jaffna” 2001).
(Editor's note: It was obvious that even 'educated' sinhalese politicians who were not following true Buddhism, suppressed the other Sinhalese, and created an 'imagined threat' of Tamils, just like Nazis imagined the Jews as a threat and burned their library?!)
did-not-finish
March 15, 2021DNF p 71
While informative, it was very dense which made it difficult to read. I wasn't enjoyed it either, which is disappointing because I was looking forward to learning about the destruction of books through history. So I decided to DNF for now.
While informative, it was very dense which made it difficult to read. I wasn't enjoyed it either, which is disappointing because I was looking forward to learning about the destruction of books through history. So I decided to DNF for now.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews