Book burning

Many readers find an image of burned books provocative.

Book burning is the practice of ceremoniously destroying by fire one or more copies of a book or other written material. In modern times other forms of media, such as gramophone records, CDs and video tapes, have also been ceremoniously burned or shredded. The practice, often carried out publicly, is usually motivated by moral, political or religious objections to the material.

"Burning books and killing scholars" in 212 BC is counted as the greatest crime of Qin Shi Huang of China.

The writer Heinrich Heine famously wrote in 1821 "Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings."— Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen (in his play Almansor). Just over a century later the Nazis did exactly as Heine had predicted.

The Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 is about a fictional future society that has institutionalized book burning.

Burning books is often associated with the Nazi regime. On May 10, 1933, Nazis in Berlin burned works of Jewish authors, and the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and other works considered "un-German".

Many people find book burning to be offensive for a variety of reasons. Some feel it is a form of censorship that religious or political leaders practice against those ideas that they oppose. This is especially true of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Those who oppose book burning on those grounds often equate those who burn books with Nazis.

Burning books in public may simply draw unwanted attention to them. Books collected by the authorities and privately disposed of should be counted among books that have effectively been "burnt." "In 367 C.E., Athanasius the zealous bishop of Alexandria,... issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such [unacceptable] writings, except for those he specifically listed as 'acceptable' even 'canonical'— a list that constitutes virtually all our present 'New Testament'" (Pagels p 97). Heretical texts do not turn up as palimpsests, washed clean and overwritten, as pagan ones do; thus, in this manner many early Christian texts have been as thoroughly "lost" as if they had been publicly burnt.

The current trend of digital communications and archiving has resulted in cataloging of written works on digital media. When these works are destroyed by deletion or purposeful purging of these works, it can be thought of as book burning. Some modern examples of this are: deletions of nodes by people other than their authors on web sites such as Everything2, the deletion of archived emails and data when trying to hide evidence. Book burning is the destruction of written works whether the medium of destruction used is fire or deletion.

Notable book burning incidents

• Following the advice of Li Si, Qin Shi Huang ordered all philosophy books and history books from states other than Qin—except copies in the imperial library for official uses—to be burned. 213 BC This is accompanied by the live burial of a large number of intellectuals, who did not comply with the state dogma (To burn the classics and to bury the scholars).
• According to the New Testament book of Acts, early converts to Christianity in Ephesus burned books of "curious arts". "Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver." (Acts 19:19, KJV) The term curious arts refers to magical practices. [1]
• Established beliefs of Epicurus was burned in a Paphlagonian marketplace by order of the charlatan Alexander, supposed prophet of Ascapius ca 160 (Lucian, Alexander the false prophet)
• The Egyptian alchemical books of Alexandria were burnt by the emperor Diocletian in 292.
• The books of Arius and his followers, after the first Council of Nicaea (AD 325), for heresy.
• The Sibylline Books were burnt by Flavius Stilicho (died AD 408).
• In 367 Athanasius called in all non-conformist texts from the monasteries of Egypt.
• The library of the Serapeum in Alexandria was trashed, burned and looted, AD 392, at the decree of Theophilus of Alexandria, who was ordered so by Theodosius I. Around the same time, Hypatia was murdered. One of the largest destruction of books occured at the Library of Alexandria, traditionally held to be in 640, however the precise years are unknown as are whether the fires were intentional or accidental.
• Etrusca Disciplina, the Etruscan books of cult and divination, collected and burned in the 5th century.
• The books of Nestorius, after an edict of Theodosius II, for heresy (AD 435).
• In 1233 Maimonides' "Guide for the Perplexed" was burnt at Montpellier, Southern France.
• In the 1480s Tomas Torquemada promoted the burning of non-Catholic literature, especially Jewish Talmuds and, after the final defeat of the Moors at Granada in 1492, Arabic books also.
• In 1497 the Bonfire of the Vanities, preached by Girolamo Savonarola, consumed pornography, lewd pictures, pagan books, gaming tables, cosmetics, copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, and all the works of Ovid which could be found in Florence.
• In 1499 or 1500, in Andalucia, Spain, much of the Arabic & Hebrew poetry there was specifically targeted for destruction by fire, at the orders of Cisneros, Archbishop of Granada. (See: Emilio Garcia Gomez. (Ed.) In Praise of Boys: Moorish Poems from Al-Andalus, 1975).
• In 1525 & 1526 William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament were burned wherever the authorities could find them.
• In 1553, Servetius was burned for a heretic at the order of John Calvin, on a remark in his translation of Ptolemy's Geography. "Around his waist were tied a large bundle of manuscript and a thick octavo printed book", his Christianismi Restitutio, three copies of which have survived [2].
• 1562 Fray Diego de Landa, acting bishop of the Yucatan, threw into the fires the sacred books of the Maya[3].
• In 1814 the entire Library of Congress was burned when the British and Canadians torched the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., in retaliation for the sacking of Toronto.
• In 1842, officials at the school for the blind in Paris France, were ordered by its new director, Armand Dufau, to burn books written in the new braille code. After every braille book at the institute that could be found was burned, supporters of the code's inventor, Louis Braille, rebelled against Dufau by continuing to use the code, and braille was eventually restored at the school.
• In 1918 the Valley of the Squinting Windows in Delvin, Ireland. The book criticised the village's inhabitants for being overly concerned with their image towards neighbours.
• The works of Jewish authors and other "degenerate" books were burnt by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.
  • May 10, 1933 on the Opernplatz in Berlin, S.A. and Nazi youth groups burned around 20,000 books from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and the Humboldt University; including works by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and H.G. Wells. Student groups throughout Germany also carried out their own book burnings on that day and in the following weeks.
• 1935 the library trustees of Warsaw, Indiana ordered the burning of all the library's works by Theodore Dreiser [4].
• In 1948, at Binghamton, New York children - overseen by priests, teachers, and parents - publicly burned around 2000 comic books.
• The novel The Satanic Verses has been the subject of bookburnings, for instance at Bolton and Bradford.
• In 1954–55 by order of the Justice Department, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) burned several tons of Wilhelm Reich's publications that mentioned "orgone energy"
• In May 1981 Sinhalese police officers on rampage burned the public library of Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka; a huge library collection, which was the second largest library in Asia, was destroyed: 97,000 books and very rare collection of ancient palm leaf volumes were among them [5].
• In February 1987 the Chilean Interior Ministry admitted that 15,000 copies of the Spanish edition of Clandestine in Chile:The Adventures of Miguel Littin were impounded and burned on November 28, 1986, in Valparaiso following direct orders from Augusto Pinochet.
• In 1992 the Oriental Institute (Orijentalni institut) in Sarajevo was attacked by Serb nationalist forces with incendiary grenades and the whole collection was burned, the largest single act of book-burning in modern history. [6].
• In the 1990s congregants of the Full Gospel Assembly in Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada burned books with ideas in them that they did not agree with, or that they deemed to contain ideas contrary to the teachings of God.
• In September 2000, students at the University of California, Berkeley seized copies of Cop Killer: How Mumia-Abu Jamal Conned Millions Into Believing He Was Framed by Dan Flynn during a protest of his speaking engagement promoting the book.
• In January 2001 the Egyptian Ministry of Culture burned 6,000 books of homoerotic poetry by Abu Nuwas, after pressure from Islamic fundamentalists.
• There have been several incidents of Harry Potter books being burned, including those directed by churches at Alamogordo, New Mexico and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Famous incidents of other items ceremoniously burnt in protest:

• Registration passes burned by Indian and Chinese citizens in South Africa, as urged by Mahatma Ghandi
• Beatles records, after John Lennon's out-of-context remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" (see History of the Beatles).
• Bras, during the feminist movement, to symbolically protest the perceived holding back of women under the guise of "support" and "care".
• Draft notification cards, during the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s and 1970s
• The flag of the United States, particularly in time of war or political conflict.
• Tenacious D records.
• Dixie Chicks records, in protest of their opinion on U.S. President George W. Bush's policies.

See also

• Banned books
• Censorship
• Fahrenheit 451, a novel by Ray Bradbury, the plot of which centers around the practice of book burning.

External links

• American Library Association: Book Burning

Sources

• Pagels, Elaine, Beyond Belief, 2003
• C.A. Forbes, 1936. "Books for the burning", in Transactions of the American Philological Association 67 pp. 114–125. A classic account written ayt the time of the Nazi book-burning rallies.