When the Nazis invaded Mali and then Timbuktu in 2012, their targets included priceless manuscripts and books that needed to be burned. But the damage could have been much greater were it not for people like Abdel Kader Haidara who risked their lives to protect medieval works. That he and others successfully smuggled 350,000 manuscripts demonstrates not only the value of these books but the lengths to which ordinary people were willing to go to save them. It's a notable victory for arsonists who have long threatened books, and a relatively rare one.
Books and libraries have been targeted by people of all backgrounds for thousands of years, sometimes intentionally and sometimes as a side effect of war. In 213 BC, the Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuang (best known for his Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an) ordered a pile of books to be burned to consolidate power in his new empire. Historian Lois Mai Chan believes: "His basic goal was not so much to eliminate these schools of thought completely as to bring them under the control of the Communist Party." The Book of Songs, Philosophical Books and history books are devoted to these schools, so the new emperor cannot be reduced to the more virtuous or successful rulers of the past. While the exact amount of information lost is unknown, Margaret Chan wrote that the historical genre suffered the most.
Qin Shihuang was the only ancient ruler who felt threatened by his ideas in writing enough to advocate arson. In Levi's "History of Rome", completed in the 1st century AD, he describes past rulers who ordered books containing prophecies and details about celebrations such as the Dionysia to be banned and burned to prevent chaos and The spread of foreign customs; the philosophers Giordano Bruno and Jan Hus both aligned themselves with Catholicism, the former because of his studies of Copernican cosmology, the latter because of his attack on the indulgences of the Church. The scholar Hans J. Hillbrand writes that executioners such as Bruno and Huss who were accused of killing heretics often had the same person who set fire to their books.
, but for Rebecca Knuth, Libreside: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries and the Burning of Books in the Twentieth Century and the author of “The Leveling of Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction,” Qin and religious leaders like him were only a small part of the early book-burning equation. Knut said: "Many burnings of ancient books were a result of conquest. Consider one of the most famous examples of burning, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. The contents and structure of this famous building were burned during several periods of political unrest. , including Caesar's pursuit of Pompey to Egypt in 48 BC, and Caliph Omar's invasion of Alexandria in 640 AD.
What changed everything was the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Not only. There were suddenly more books and more knowledge. “With the printing press, you had a huge increase in literacy and modern science and all these things,” Knut said. “In dictatorships, some people wanted to. Some way of reversing the impact of the printing press.
According to Knuth, after the printing press helped bring about the Age of Enlightenment, the motivations for book burning changed, although collateral damage from war continued to occur (just think of the Library of Congress during the War of 1812 or All libraries were destroyed throughout Europe during World War II. People saw knowledge as a way to change themselves and the world, so knowledge became a more dangerous act and was no longer completely controlled by the elite. What else could be done? "What better way to reshape the balance of power while delivering a message?" Knut said the unifying factor among all types of purposeful book burners in the 20th century was that the perpetrator felt like he was against the Smithsonian. Said: "While we still kept our jobs, we basically couldn't really do any scientific research." While the methods may be different (and less obvious) than in the past, the result is the same: knowledge is purposefully extracted from the public
Technology has undoubtedly changed the way we share and preserve information, but Knuth believes the core motivation for book burning, no matter what form it takes, remains the same: to prioritize one type of information over another. Not the other way around.
"That's why power is so scary," Knuth said, "because power allows you to realize the logic of your beliefs.
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