Burning Books and Leveling Libraries : Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction / Rebecca Knuth
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Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction Rebecca Knuth PRAEGER Burning Books and Leveling Libraries Burning Books and Leveling Libraries EXTREMIST VIOLENCE AND CULTURAL DESTRUCTION Rebecca Knuth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knuth, Rebecca, 1949– Burning books and leveling libraries : extremist violence and cultural destruction / Rebecca Knuth. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–275–99007–9 1. Libraries—Destruction and pillage—History—20th century. 2. Libraries—Destruction and pillage—History—21st century. 3. Book burning—History—20th century. 4. Book burning—History—21st century. 5. Radicalism—History—20th century. 6. Radicalism— History—21st century. 7. Cultural property. I. Title. Z659.K57 2006 025.8’2—dc22 2006002747 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2006 by Rebecca Knuth All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006002747 ISBN: 0–275–99007–9 First published in 2006 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America ∞ TM The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint material from the follow- ing sources: Excerpts from Sivaramani, “A War-Torn Night.” In Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka, ed. Chelva Kanaganayakam. Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2001. Reprinted with the per- mission of TSAR Publications. Excerpts from F. R. Scott, “Degeneration.” In F. R. Scott: Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966. Reprinted with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F. R. Scott. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions. This book is dedicated to Charlene Gilmore, my treasured writing mentor. Her insight, editing, and comments have vastly improved the quality of the book. She has been tenacious, demanding, and totally dedicated to excellence in expression and the use of language to unlock meaning. Contents Preface ix Chapter 1. Understanding Modern Biblioclasm 1 Chapter 2. Tracing the Path of Extremism from Robespierre to Milosevic 17 Part I Grappling for Voice and Power 41 Chapter 3. Political Protestors and Amsterdam’s South African Institute, 1984 43 Chapter 4. Ethnic Biblioclasm, 1980–2005 71 Part II Absolute Power and the Drive to Purify Society 99 Chapter 5. National Socialism and the Destruction of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, 1933 101 Chapter 6. Secular Fanaticism and the Auto-Genocide of Cambodia, 1975–1979 121 Chapter 7. Fundamentalism and the Destruction of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, 1994–2001 141 viii Contents Part III War, Power Vacuum, and Anarchy 159 Chapter 8. Dueling Ideologies and Total War, 1939–1945 161 Chapter 9. Anarchy and Acquisitive Vandalism, 1967–2003 179 Chapter 10. Errors of Omission and Cultural Destruction in Iraq, 2003 201 Index 223 Preface After the manuscript for my previous book , Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, was packed off to the publisher, I forestalled postpartum writing arrest and prepublication jitters by beginning another book. There was much work to be done on the topic of library destruction, and I was struggling to see the forest for the trees. Regime- sponsored, ideologically driven destruction seemed clearly to be just one facet of global patterns that were threatening books and libraries. Idiosyncratic incidents cried out for analysis, as did the loss of books in the familiar condi- tions of war and civil unrest, as well as in extraordinary circumstances like strategic bombing. But the path forward was unclear. The libricide model had emerged rather quickly and was fl eshed out in dis- crete case studies, but the structure and scope of what would become Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction emerged over time. Instead of a relatively straightforward process of searching for infor- mation, performing analysis, formulating and substantiating a model, and pos- ing explanations and conclusions, I was faced with intimations—seemingly disparate pieces to a puzzle whose contours were unclear. I would move from a case to background materials to theory and interdisciplinary perspectives, and then back to cases. Each chapter was rewritten at least fi ve times in the process, and the order and structure of the chapters, the scaffolding of the entire book, underwent many revisions. From the disparate cases and gross ambiguity there fi nally emerged clarity and a unifying thread behind book and library destruction. I began with the cultural losses that resulted from the Allies’ strategic bombing in World War II because this was the biggest conceptual hurdle x Preface I had faced in the fi rst book. Having chosen not to label this behavior as libricide, mainly on the premise that the bombers did not intentionally tar- get libraries, I needed to resolve my qualms about exempting the Allies from direct culpability. I wanted to understand the Allied mindset and how those who acted in the name of democracy and civilization could have committed destruction on the scale of what occurred in Germany and Japan. I soon came to see that modern global wars are fought over ideas and ways of life, and that ideology lends a desperate ferocity to the proceedings. Modernism, with its open-ended use of ideas to mold society and guide the state, provides many different venues by which extremism, including the mindsets of total war, fl ourishes. The tactics and theory of total war are, for example, an outcome of the extreme application of logic to a social problem. Unbridled militarism vests all parties in violence. In Libricide my focus was on intentional, systematic, and large-scale destruc- tion that was driven by ideological mandates. But for the book that would fol- low, I had an intuition that a more complex set of motivations would subsume my explanations of libricide, and that this framework would also embrace local and contained incidents. When I began probing the impulses behind high- profi le bonfi res of Harry Potter books, staged in 2001 and 2003 by church groups in Pennsylvania, Maine, New Mexico, and Michigan, I stumbled upon a pattern of extremism, renunciation, and affi rmation that quickly gained sig- nifi cance. In these relatively isolated, localized cases of destruction, funda- mentalist congregations burned books, videos, and other pop-cultural items in protests against offensive values that, they said, had increasingly pushed their Christian faith and infl uence to the margins of American life. Pastors declared that burning Harry Potter books was a means for Christians to build community, affi rm their allegiance to God, and separate themselves from a pop culture they believed to be detrimental to society. Although this chapter was eventually dropped because the ceremonies did not match in scale and seriousness the other cases under study, my observations about the fundamen- talists’ motivation and mindsets became key to identifying dynamics of book destruction that, I believe, play out worldwide. My next exposure to this pattern came with an investigation into the Suf- fragettes’ fi rebombing of a public library in Birmingham, England, in 1914. Achieving the vote for British women was a cause pursued with a zeal that transmuted into militancy. The Suffragettes were radicals who endured public abuse and incarcerations; their hunger strikes were broken by brutal forced feedings. Vandalism and iconoclasm (though never physical violence against people) became justifi able tactics in their war against a corrupt social order that degraded women. Firebombing the library was an act of desperation, a protest against public and offi cial indifference to their cause. Again, most of the material I collected on the Suffragette incident would be left on the cutting-room fl oor, but this case reinforced my sense of a strong connection between vandalism, iconoclasm, and book destruction. Those who destroy libraries were emerging from the forest, and the profi le of a beleaguered lot, Preface xi desperate for voice and vulnerable to the infl uence of ideas that demanded action, came into sharper focus still. And soon after, library destruction began to materialize as an attention- garnering tactic of political protest, an emblematic way for extremists to carry totalistic logic to a natural and apparently constructive endpoint. The case of the anti-apartheid protestors who destroyed Amsterdam’s South African Institute in 1984 was key to unlocking the phenomenon of biblioclasm and establishing such behavior as a function of extremism. The attack unleashed a storm of derision that battered the walls of ethical immunity the perpetrators had erected, and the sociological perspectives that provided a theoretical bal- last for this chapter ultimately served to ground the whole book in notions of confl ict, social protest, and vandalism. As the book unfolded, extremism emerged again and again as a key ele- ment in book and library destruction. The pattern of righteous protest I had identifi ed in the American religious fundamentalist incidents held explana- tory power in my examination of the annihilation of texts during ethnic con- fl icts in India, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, where cultural violence was a means of simultaneously striking out at corrupting infl uences and antithetical values and affi rming identifi cation with a “superior” religious or ethnic group.