
Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack - pseudolus
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonfires-of-reason
======
Saturdays
Such an interesting topic to start with, and glad he extends it from the
premise of burning books to things like misuse, access and privatization of
knowledge.

The burning of Harry Potter books fascinated me growing up. Back when I was a
teen it was for religious reasons. More recently it has also occurred for
political and protest reasons directed at JK Rowling. It so happens that
banning books and 'book burnings' may have the opposite effect and rather call
added attention and possibly higher sales to the books at the subject of the
ban/burn. I tend to frequent the 'banned book' section at bookstores such as
'The Strand', some of my favorite books are there.

Some great literature is only known to us because someone decided NOT to burn
works such as Virgil's Aeneid and Dickinson's poems. I know it's not the point
of this book in particular, but interesting nonetheless.

Thanks for the awareness, I'll be picking this up to read!

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teleforce
I am not sure how historian writing a book on knowledge under attack,
conveniently missed one single biggest related event involving two of the
world's history biggest empires, i.e. the ransack of Baghdad, at the time
center of knowledge of the Abbasids empire and the world, by the Mongols [1]?

It is reported that after the defeat of the Abbasids, the trashing of the
books caused the rivers around Baghdad turned its color into the color of the
black ink. The event practically ended the Islamic golden age since Baghdad
was the center of the world knowledge after Alexandria by translating much of
the work of the Greek and contributing their own. There is also the location
of the famous House of Wisdom, where Al-Khwarizmi was one of the heads, who
wrote the first book on modern algebra and the word "Algorithm" is named after
his name [2]. It is also reported that at the time books are so precious and
at one time Ptolemy's Almagest was claimed as a condition for peace by the
Caliph Al-Ma'mun after a war between the Abbasids and the Eastern Roman
Empire. Perhaps some of the later discoveries or not yet to be discovered
knowledge, have already discovered at the time and it was lost forever due to
the ransacking of Baghdad by the Mongols.

The saving grace is that there's a another Islamic Spanish empire in Europe
but fortunately the Spanish did not destroy the books but study them after the
conquest of Toledo in 1083AD. It's probably not an exxageration to say that
the western Renaissance started in Toledo, the city of knowledge for the
Muslim Spanish empire, then spread to the rest of Europe[3]. The knowledge
spread to the rest of Europe is further accelerated after the invention of
printing press and books by Gutenberg in Germany, and as they say the rest is
history.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_\(1258\))

[2][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom)

[3][https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/spain...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/spain_1.shtml)

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rvrabec
Glad they explore what the modern day equivalent of burning books is... not a
precise comparison but good to noodle on. "Ovenden sees myriad threats to
knowledge amid this ‘digital deluge’. There is ‘linkrot’, those links that
lead you to websites that are no longer available. There are denial-of-
service-type cyberattacks, like the one that crippled Estonia in 2007, which
see websites bombarded with queries, overwhelming servers and causing them to
crash (even the Bodleian has been targeted). There is ‘fake news’, as well as
‘alternative facts’, and the manipulation or intentional erasure of data.
Ovenden sees the emergence of ‘private knowledge kingdoms’ and ‘surveillance
capitalism’ as particular threats: a ‘disproportionate amount of the world’s
memory has now been outsourced to tech companies without society realising the
fact or really being able to comprehend the consequences’."

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gadders
There is also cancellation.

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omginternets
Yes, I'm quite surprised (and frankly a bit disappointed) that this wasn't the
article's main focus. If anything resembles book-burning today, it's the
historical revisionism embedded in "cancel culture".

~~~
NoOneNew
I'd like to point out that "revisionism" is even scarier in the digital age.

Once you print a book/magazine/newspaper. It's done and locked down on what
you said. You can't exactly take it back. Other than saying, "Hey, I was
wrong" or whatever. I'm not talking about small errors or whatever. More, the
general topic. Like, in the USA during the Bush 2 administration and prior,
Democrats were against illegal immigration and Republicans were for it. Now,
it's reversed. Hell, even Obama was for a lot more border security during his
Senate days. But that changed during his run for presidency. (Broad brush
strokes on the issue, obviously far more nuanced of a topic, I'm not on a hill
for one or the other right now. This is strictly about the fact of their
standpoints changing, nothing else. Calm your political panties.)

In the digital age of easy deleting and altering information, are we going to
get to the point on trouble judging what is "historical fact" even more so
than ever?

One simple thought, think of all the old racist cartoons from the Disney,
Looney Toons era. Some more racist than others. But, lets say all of it is
burned, deleted and gone. Hell, the old film reels aren't going to last too
much longer anyways. 40 or 50 years from now, there's no actual proof of it
existing except for some articles saying "there were racist cartoons by XYZ
creator". Alright, prove it. "Well, it says here." But where is the actual
cartoon? To be fair, a lack of evidence makes it hard to believe it ever
happened. It's pretty fair, at that point, for someone to deny the cartoons
ever happened. Especially since we're becoming a far more "evidence" based
culture with a lack of anecdotal belief. A random blogger saying "XYZ existed"
isn't proof either... because obviously you can't lie on the internet... cough
cough. Photoshoping, deep fakes... the whole think of what "happened" is a
scarier concept. At some point, do we just not trust a single damn thing on
the internet?

I do know it's difficult to really wipe anything off the internet. Mostly due
to the distributed nature and freedom of speech aspect of it... but I think a
lot of people have to agree, both of those attributes are being threatened.
Preserving history, no matter the sensitivity of it is pretty important.

Weird rant that's marginally related, but it's something that's been bothering
me a lot the past few years. The "book burning" problem is going to get worse
at this rate unless some major cultural changes happen.

~~~
scottlocklin
One of the great treasures of the internet is Google books; something which
exists in a precarious legal state and which could disappear. Worse; libraries
are getting rid of physical copies. Probably especially in "non approved"
subjects, which pretty much everything before 1945 was. There is libgen at
least... but it's not as complete in older books.

Best thing on twitter I've seen is basically a list of NYT diffs:
[https://twitter.com/nyt_diff?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp...](https://twitter.com/nyt_diff?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)

~~~
NoOneNew
>One of the great treasures of the internet is Google books

I'm not saying your wrong... I just don't think that's enough. It's still
digital. It can be changed and who would know? Yea, I guess the same can apply
to print media... but if 10 people have a print-dated copy of something, you
can cross reference on potential forgery-changes. You don't really get that
with something like Google Books.

But again, physical copies still aren't perfect because of environmental
impact. Storage. Care. Reprinting over time. What's worth reprinting? Fires.
Floods. Organizing.

Though.... damn... I can't believe I'm saying this. I'm the first one, when
the day comes, to happily pull the plug on cryptocurrency when humanity is
done with the stupid thing... but after McAfee eats his own dick (look up his
bitcoin bet if you don't know what I'm talking about). However, a distributed
ledger of important libraries isn't the worst idea... minus the stupid fucking
coin part. Just... that needs to be dropped.

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rbecker
> The third burning is certainly the best known: the Nazi Bücherverbrennungen
> that followed Hitler’s rise to power.

Soon followed by the Allies' own book burnings: _a list was drawn up of over
30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then
banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the
possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offence. All the
millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed._ \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship)

