There is more
than one way to demolish a book, to vaporize the carrier
and symbol of enlightenment, though historically fire was
the preferred method, otherwise known as the Auto-da-Fé.
Originally referring to the burning of heretics at the stake,
the practice was extended to obliterating the humanistic
inventory of knowledge, culture and community resources.
Perhaps the
most famous historical instance was the partial and then
final burning of the celebrated library in Alexandria over
three separate occasions: 48 BC (by Julius Caesar, according
to Plutarch); 391-415 AD (often attributed to Christian
rioters); and 640 AD by a Muslim army. As Edward Gibbon
recounts, upon learning of a great library containing all
the knowledge of the world, the conquering general supposedly
asked the Caliph for instructions regarding the Library’s
holdings. He replied, “They will either contradict
the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree
with it, so they are superfluous.” In any case, though
remnants survived, the Library essentially ceased to exist.
The destruction
of the great library in Baghdad in 1258 was not by fire
but by water, which amounts to the same thing. Legend has
it that when the Mongols laid siege to Baghdad, the library’s
entire collection of manuscripts and books was thrown into
the Tigris. The river is said to have run black with ink
for seven days.
A famed European
instance has given us the phrase “bonfire of the vanities”
— of which there were many such cremations over the
years — instigated by the Dominican friar Girolamo
Savonarola in Florence in 1497. He sponsored several of
these “bonfires of the vanities” where classical
books and works of art were burned, including manuscripts,
sculptures, paintings, musical instruments, gaming tables,
nude statues, harmless trinkets, beauty products, and anything
considered a work of art.
Savonarola,
writes Richard Cavendish in History Today (v. 48,
Issue 5, May 1988), “grimly disapproved of jokes and
frivolity, of poetry and inns, of sex (especially the homosexual
variety), of gambling, of fine clothes and jewelry and luxury
of every sort. He denounced the works of Boccaccio, nude
paintings, pictures of pagan deities and the whole humanistic
culture of the Italian Renaissance. He called for laws against
vice and laxity. The friar also disapproved of profiteering
financiers and businessmen. He put an end to the carnivals
and festivals the Florentines traditionally enjoyed, substituting
religious festivals instead, and employed street urchins
as a junior gestapo to sniff out luxurious and suspect items.”
(One thinks of the recent looting spree in Philadelphia
of high-end commercial establishments, whose perpetrators
NBC Philadelphia dismissed as “mostly consisting of
juveniles.” Though, of course, the motives of the
junior gestapo and the Philly juveniles vary).
Nicoló
Machiavelli in his History of Florence calls Savonarola
a “plebian prince [who] persuaded the people of Florence
that he spoke with God and did not have to report to the
magistrates,” thus exonerating the preacher on the
grounds of political expedience in his effort to remake
society. His fire was a burnt offering to the Lord. This,
however, was not the consensus. Francesco Guicciardini’s
The History of Florence provides a more reasonable
account of Savonarola’s career and its aftermath,
a book well worth escaping the flames.
The modern age
does not lack for spectacular book burnings, such as those
carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s when books of all
genres and subjects by Jewish authors were heaped in large
pyres and set aflame to the great delight of the multitudes.
Repressive regimes live and die by the Auto-da-Fé.
As Orwell writes
in 1984 about the totalitarian state Oceania, “Every
record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street
building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless Present
in which the Party is always right.” Newspeak alters
the truth in publications and on radio, just as political
correctness, the legacy media, and digital platforms routinely
do today, with little critical awareness among large swaths
of the population. In the Afterword to the 1961 edition
of the book, Erich Fromm aptly warns of a society “of
automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality,
of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware
of it because of ‘doublethink’.”
We have seen
today that libraries can be “burned” by electronic
means as well, that is, the cyber destruction of information
via censorship, spurious fact-checking, and what is known
as “deletionism.” Muniments can suddenly be
made to disappear from one moment to the next. Equity-based
book-weeding has become a favored device of school boards
in purging their libraries according to categories like
inclusivity, relevance, diversity, cultural responsiveness,
and date of publication — all forms of a so-called
“equitable curation cycle.” The Peel District
School Board in Toronto, for example, has sent Harry Potter
packing, and, even worse, Anne Frank’s Diary of
a Young Girl is not to be found. A diversity audit
is as good as a five-alarm fire.
Culture critic
Mark Tapson observes, “For all of the Left’s
shrill, false charges that conservatives are frenzied, anti-intellectual
book-banners, it is the totalitarians of wokeness who are
actively engaging in the online stealth editing of classic
fiction, the mob cancellation of insufficiently woke authors,
and the quiet culling of books from library shelves to accommodate
the ideological requirements of ‘equity’ and
‘inclusion.’ Although the aforementioned ‘equity’
book weeding policy was implemented in Canada, make no mistake—a
similar woke targeting of the West’s literary heritage
will be coming to school libraries in America, if it hasn’t
already, and possibly even to public libraries and bookstores
as well.”
Not to be outdone,
government-mandated “book burning” proceeds
under cover of democratic law, as Canadian author, journalist,
and director of Rebel News, Ezra Levant, discovered when
his book The Librano$: What the Media Won’t Tell
You about Justin Trudeau’s Corruption,”
came under the shadow of Trudeau’s RCMP just prior
to the October 2019 election. Levant was targeted for contravening
sections 352 and 353 of the Canada Elections Act which requires
third parties to register during a federal election. The
ruling manifestly does not apply, as the Act states, to
published books and “does not include…the distribution
of a book, or the promotion of the sale of a book, for no
less than its commercial value, if the book was planned
to be made available to the public regardless of whether
there was to be an election.”
In his recent
legal challenge against Trudeau’s censorship policy,
Levant found himself facing seven federal lawyers to his
one as well as a compliant judge who, Levant writes, “didn’t
really think it was a big deal for authors to be summoned
by police to explain what their ‘plans’ were
for publishing political books. It wasn’t too much
of an imposition, she implied.” This is what should
be expected in a totalitarian state masking as a democracy,
for which Canada has become the world’s poster boy.
One way or another, an Auto-da-Fé is in play.
Similarly, the
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
(CRTC) has announced new regulations that will expand control
over what Canadians will see, hear, and broadcast over the
internet. Under the powers vested in the telecommunications
office by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Bills C-11
and C-18, online streaming services will be regulated. “The
regulatory anaconda will squeeze slowly,” warns former
CRTC National Commissioner Timothy Denton, “but will
squeeze tightly.” As the Western Standard points out,
“from [government] involvement, it is but a short
walk to influence and then control.” Public ignorance
of the real world around us is the purpose behind these
repressive measures.
Clearly, there
is more than one way to “burn” a book, to cauterize
history and incinerate truth. Richard Weaver in Visions
of Order is very clear on this point. What we are witnessing
is “the cultivation of amnesia,” the filtering
of the meaning behind current events and the elimination
of the past, that leads to the death of “intellectual
responsibility.” “I do not find any other period,”
he writes, “in which men have felt to an equal degree
that the past either is uninteresting or is a reproach to
them.” When we realize the extent to which cultural
memory is being erased, “we are made to wonder whether
there is not an element of suicidal impulse in this mind,
or at least an impulse of self-hatred.” Profound words.
Hatred of the civilization in which one has been nourished,
enjoyed the highest living standard in history, and profited
from the benefits of accessible education is tantamount
to hatred of the self.
Amnesia of both
the immediate and the millennial can be achieved, as we’ve
seen, in many different ways. Fire and water amply suffice,
but such methods are blatantly conspicuous and may generate
resentment and resistance. The Orwellian burying and reframing
of basic data and the mutilation of language are more effective
methods. They are a staple of totalitarian regimes. Equity-based
book-weeding and the proliferation of arbitrary, or what
we might call frivolously votable, law with its aura of
legitimacy are among the prime forms of coercion practiced
by presumably democratic states.
Indeed, the
book-burning theme is a perennial fixture of the Western
imagination and figures prominently in our literature. One
thinks of books like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451, with its beleaguered network of book lovers who
have memorized great works of literature and philosophy
to counter the scorching of the archive; Elias Canetti’s
“Auto-da-Fé,” which impishly reverses
the theme — books are now fetishes; and Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities — though what
Wolfe’s protagonist learns is that the objects of
his passions and pursuits really were vanities. But for
the most part, what the political and religious arsonists
wish to carbonize are not vanities and trivialities but
the essential artifacts that create and constitute a culture
of choice, freedom, and, no less important, intellectual
literacy.
Regrettably,
we are now experiencing, as Mario Vargas Llosa writes in
Notes on the Death of Culture, a “manifestation
of barbarism,” an eruption of boredom, and the eclipse
of the integrity of mind and conscience. “The present…is
incomprehensible without the past” — a truism
worth noting — just as it is semantically void without
a mind capable of parsing the nuances of experience. When
“the adventure of the spirit discovered through books”
is extinguished, when the Auto-de-Fé becomes an instrument
of official policy, we will find ourselves, as Llosa says,
living in “a public of halfwits.” This, it appears,
is pretty much the case. It is also what our authorities
emphatically desire.
