As one periodically revisits horrors from the past, I find myself often thinking of this horrible story from the CBC, about the Peel District School Board pulping its library books.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332
It's not just that they decided to weed the books, which all libraries do, however much it may pain antiquarian hoarders such as myself. It's that they decided to destroy the books, rip off the covers and pulp the lot, that burns me.
I particularly love the Board's justification: " "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."
For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."
Not suitable for any learners? No word on the doubtless vigorous process by which they came to this conclusion; I'm certain some deeply careful and qualified individual read every single page before deciding said book failed to meet their well-defined and public criteria. Thank goodness we have these self appointed guardians to protect our we widdow bwains fwom hawm. Nope, not even a garage sale. Junk the lot!
That was three years ago, and it still makes me mad.
Of high minded protecting chaperones protecting the delicate public, there are many precedents though.
From 221-206 BC, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shui Huang decided to burn every book in his kingdom (or at least the ones which predated his reign), the authors that wrote them, and the scholars that read them. Partly because he didn't want any histories circulating that he didn't write, and partly because he thought poetry was a waste of time.
Who was it who said “Those who burn books will soon burn people”?
This of course reminded me of Hitler’s Deutsche Studentenschaft making massive bonfires of All Quiet on the Western Front, amongst countless other titles – anything worth reading really.
From there, I couldn’t help thinking of the less dramatic but much more destructive weedings of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR – Glavlit (don’t you just love Soviet acronyms?) who pulped some 24, 138,799 books between 1938 and 1939.
While looking up those figures I found that more recently Buddhist
mobs torched some 97,000 books at the Jafna Public Library in Sri Lanka. Shades
of Alexandria. . .
I don’t off hand have the figures for Mao, Pol Pot, or Texas, where school
libraries are being emptied of anything that smells gay. Suffice it to say,
there is a long time-dishonoured tradition of destroying books, and everyone
who’s ever done it has thought it the socially responsible thing to do.
Naturally, this all brings us to Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit
451 is the final word on the subject. Bringing that up seems a cliché, like
bringing up Kafka or Orwell, but I think there’s an aspect of it most folks don’t
fully appreciate. Indeed, the burning of the books, “the blazing and burning to
bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history” (page 1!) provide the
novel’s most arresting images. But it’s
icing on the cake. In the sick, soulless, and slowly dying society of Bradbury’s
dystopia, books, along with anything else beautiful or meaningful, lose their
value and are quite casually tossed aside.
We’re approaching a post literate society, one very much
like that in 451. Addicted to screens and permanent noise, oblivious to
nature, frivolous, forgetful. I’ve had more than one student who got through
English class without having to read a thing. The teachers are giving up; society
won’t back them up. Books aren’t considered important. Even as masses flock to
big budget adaptations of Frankenstein, or Wuthering Heights, by
directors who haven’t evidently read them.
“You have to burn books,” said Bradbury. “You just stop
people from reading them."
The Peel Board can kiss my ass.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Directorate_for_the_Protection_of_State_Secrets_in_the_Press
Wasterman, Frank. Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. New York: The Overlook Press. 2011
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