Some notable and particularly destructive book burnings have included: Wikipedia defines ‘book burning’ as the “practice of ceremoniously destroying by fire one or more copies of a book or other written material.” The practice, usually carried out in public (like public hangings in Medieval times) is generally motivated by moral, religious or political objections to the material. In 1992, the Jaffna Public Library of Sri Lanka-repository of nearly 100,000 rare books of Tamil history and literature-was burned by Sinhalese Buddhists.īrownshirts and Hitlerjugend perform Nazi salut as books burn in Opernplatz, Berlin in 1933 In 1966, when Mao Zedong took power in China and implemented the Cultural Revolution, any book that did not conform to party propaganda, such as those that promoted capitalism or other dangerous ideas, were destroyed. Book burning continued, unfettered, perhaps taking on a more symbolic and insidious role, and no less violent. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, there were suddenly far more books-and more accessible knowledge. The Library of Alexandria had its contents and structure burned during several periods of political upheaval as a casualty of brutal war and associated despoliation and pillaging.
“A lot of ancient book burning was a function of conquest,” writes author Rebecca Knuth.
Qin and religious leaders like him are only a small part of the early book-burning equation. “Qin was only one in a long line of ancient rulers who felt threatened enough by the ideas expressed in written form to advocate arson,” says Boissoneault. He and others succeeded in smuggling out 350,000 manuscripts.” “In 213 B.C., Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (more widely remembered for his terracotta army in Xian) ordered a bonfire of books as a way of consolidating power in his new empire.” According to historian Lois Mai Chan, “His basic objective was not so much to wipe out these schools of thought completely as to place them under governmental control.”īoissoneault adds, “When al-Qaida Islamists invaded Mali, and then Timbuktu in 2012, among their targets were priceless manuscripts-books that needed to be burned.” The damage might have been much worse if not for men like Abdel Kader Haidara, who risked their lives to protect the medieval works. In her 2017 article A Brief History of Book Burning, from the Printing Press to Internet Archives Lorraine Boissoneault writes, “As long as there have been books, people have burned them.” Books were burned to silence a dissonant, threatening and potentially rousing voice they were burned to wipe out a cultural presence They were burned to control and curtail intellectual freedom they were burned to simply ruin and pillage and destroy.īooks and libraries have been targeted by people of all backgrounds for thousands of years, sometimes intentionally and sometimes as a side-effect of war, Boissoneault tells us. House of Leaves burning (photo by Learning Lark)
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