Bibliocaust - bookburning, mass destruction of knowledge, and the erasure of memory

"The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow
will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting
its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he
who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
-- Pravin Lal

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives."
---John Lennon.

We are currently living through the greatest effort at mass censorship in history. Read on....

Throughout history, access to knowledge has been carefully curtailed, redacted, revised, embellished, and filtered. Largely, albeit not exclusively, by those in power. Imagine how much easier this might be should society develop a system wherein everyone from infancy onward would be required by force of law to accept, learn, and memorize that which is deemed appropriate (and reject that deemed inappropriate) in order to advance. Now hold that thought, and read on:

Restricting access to knowledge by destroying the means of such access is known as "bibliocaust". Bibliocaust is usually perpetrated to curtail the basic human right to make informed decisions concerning events. Over the centuries hundreds of millions of works have been destroyed for this reason. Scholarly dissertations, religious writings, poetry, artistic studies, philosophical explorations, scientific research, and so much more - all burned, all destroyed. Gone forever in a bibliocaust of millions of books, writings, and thought.

It has been suggested that the root cause of bibliocaust is the so-called daminatio memoria. That is to say, the attempt to erase not merely knowledge, but all memory of said knowledge.  For example, the order to destroy all Aztec works by the Bishop of Mexico during was designed in large part to eradicate the idea that there could be an alternate world model (in this case Christian) under which people could live. More than mere censorship, daminatio meoria  seeks to completely eradicate any hint of contrary viewpoints or that contrary viewpoints ever existed.

Bibliocaust of course ranges from the relatively simple physical destruction of books  (or information on a hard drive), to the much worse inculcation of a lack of desire for knowledge and blind acceptance of the 'party line'. This type of bibliocaust can be perpetuated in organizations such as Hitler Youth, Mao's 'corrections', or the modern variants guised for example, military training for children (i.e. anyone under 21 years of age). This more subtle type of bibliocaust is a tightly controlled enforced system of mass 'education'. The propaganda purpetuated by Durkeim, Bernays, Maslow, and their ilk in North America, Britain, and elsewhere (see my page on pedagogy) is exemplary in this regard.

The result of this controlled pedagogy is what I would term an a priori bibliocaust - knowledge destruction via the two-fold control of 1) the instillation antipathy to learning, and 2) complete acculturation to a particular world view. This a priori bibliocaust perpetuates many social ills, such as religious fanaticism ("our God is the only true God"), unquestioning patriotism ("my country right or wrong"), obtuse simplification ("you are either with us or against us"), outright fabrication ("we are here to bring democracy, not steal all your oil"), and similar moral lapses.

Such lapses can only exist where there is redacted and diminished knowledge amongst the general population.

On this webpage by way of introduction to the topic of bibliocaust and its results (particularly for education and re-education should you be motivated to read between the lines  ) I mention just a few, a very few, of some of tens of thousands of well documented cases of mass destruction of knowledge  which has occurred over the centuries.

To keep the list short, I have grossly simplified examples, which have been more or less at random selected only from the west. Needless to say leaders in China (notably Mao), India, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Burma, Japan, Indonesia and other non-western areas of the planet  have also figuratively and literally burned books.  Quite often in fact. Yet I believe the west to be unique in that those in power in have dedicated themselves more ferociously to the destruction of knowledge than anywhere else. In this regard the story of bibliocaust in the west is intimately linked to the Christian church, as illustrated by some of the examples below. Why? Because the separation of church and state in the history of the west has always been ... moot.  The Christian religion was the secular power, or power behind the secular, or the excuse for the secular, for most of western history. Including our own time.

Hence this many centuries-long biblocaust is still ongoing.  Examples abound, from the destruction say, of Poland's unique library collections by the Nazis, the more recent bombing of the libraries of Serbia, the massive (sometimes even complete) redactions allowed under so-called 'Freedom of Information' laws, or the current mass historical revisionism of nations whose economy is so dependent upon perpetuating needless war (see my pages regarding war).

2^st C CE
- Christian Bishops Polycarp and Iraneaus whom I discuss here worked hard to destroy any and all writings which presented Jesus's ideas in ways different from their own viewpoints. In particular they destroyed writings (and writers) who argued against the the power of Bishops as arbiters of which doctrines were acceptable. They were so successful that almost all writings about Jesus and his teachings which were contrary to the rather fanatical and politically motivated Pauline doctrines were completely destroyed.

3rd C

Christian monks seized the scientist Hypatia (whom I discuss here) and burned all scientific works they could find. Hypatia taught Euclidean mathematics, Ptolemy's astronomy, philosophy, history, and so on. But she did not teach that Jesus was God. And so under direction of Bishop Cyril holy Christian monks attacked her, pulled her eyes out of their sockets, broke her arms and legs, cut out her tongue, and left her to bleed to death. They then gathered her scientific work and burnt them and indeed all of her writings. Only small fragments of these remain, showing her to have had a brilliant mind. Cyril's reward in part for this successful daminatio memoria, for the destruction of science, was to be canonized. He was made a saint by the Church.

4^th C
-Christian priests burned to the ground the Library of Antioch, one of the largest libraries in the world. The Library contained the greatest selection of Greek theatrical works in the world, lyric poetry, works of Sappho, and so much more.  This treasure was completely  destroyed by the Christians - thousands of works lost to humanity.
- Emperor Arcadius  ordered the burning of all works by Eunomious. Eunomious had the audacity to teach that Jesus was not God.

5^th C
- Christian monks and priests under Theophilus destroyed the library where Hypatia had once taught. Everything was destroyed. First the filled the library with crosses – the symbol of their holy work – then demolished.
- Around the same time Theodosious oversaw house-to-house searches confiscating and later burning all books of the Nestorians in large part because the Nestorians did not quite see the logic behind declaring a young teenage self-professed virgin named Mary to be the literal 'mother of God'. 

6^th - 8^th C
- The Council of Trullo, in Canon LXII of 691,   forbade any Christian from representing or writing comedy. This was code. Greek 'comedies' and similar works were often a means for exploring spirituality, politics, and human thought in general. Banning 'comedies' was akin to banning this larger meaning. That is to say, the Council of Bishops banned pretty much everything other than the Church's own writen works. Other writing was to be burnt.
- During these centuries of church dominance, essentially no books were copied. Original texts handed down for centuries were destroyed.  The  Velum upon which works by Plautus, Cicero, Livy, Pliny the Elder, Virgil, Lucan, Juvenal, Fronto, and many others had existed was erased, and overwritten with religious writings. Hence many of the works of these great Greek and Roman thinkers have been lost to history.
- Pope Leo III proscribed images, including those of ecclesiastical subjects.  The result? Virtually every book which could be found, most of which carried images in one form or another, particularly those of science and medicine, were seized and destroyed. Even those sans images but with fantastic calligraphy or containing beautifully illuminated manuscripts were burned.

12^th C
Pope Innocent III ordered all of Peter Abelard's works burnt. Abelard had dared to publish a scholarly discussion of philosophical ideas which the Church deemed heresy. Fortunately they did not get all of them, and some of Abelard's brilliant work still survives.

13^th C
In 1204 the Fourth Christian Crusade reached Constantinople. There the great libraries holding tens of thousands of rare works were burned to the ground. Most of the works therein were permanently lost to history.

15^th C
Francisco Jimnez de Cisnero, Archbishop of Toledo ordered the burning of all Korans. In all more than 5000 were burned in an auto-da-fe. Also burned were rare Muslim religious treatises, now lost for all time. But perhaps most horrific from an academic and literary viewpoint, was the Church's destruction of huge amounts of Sufi literature, books on medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and so on. Gone forever. Jimnez was reward by being made a Cardinal (akin to a company vice president) of the church.

16^th C
- Pope Leo X prohibited dissemination or reading of any of Luthor's (not Lex Luthor!) writings. The same Pope later joined with King Charles V in prohibiting any book from being published which did not first have Church approval. Anyone authoring or publishing anything which these great leaders found not to their liking was sentenced to death.
- Juan de Zum, Bishop of Mexico ordered the destruction of all Aztec books. Everything - the leaning, scholarship, and literature of an entire people - was burned in a huge bonfire. The handful of works which remain to our day were memorized by a few brave Aztecs and passed on to their children.
- The Church under Pope Paul IV published the Index Librorum Prohibiturum – a list of prohibited books. Good Christians everywhere eschewed any written work not on the Librorum Prohibiturum, effectively burning the books to history because no one would publish them. This practice has been implemented in our own time by many governments, albeit in a far less well known fashion.
- Franciscan monk Diego de Landa, later Bishop of Yucatan, burned all major codices of the Mayans, completely eradicating access to this literature for all time. He and his monks ensured that everything was destroyed, burning and killing so that today a mere three codices remain.

18^th C
-  Copies of Voltaire's Philosophical Letters were destroyed by the Church.
- Diderot's Pensées philosophiques in which atheism was discussed as viable were publicly burned.
- Many books, including Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws  were added to the Librorum Prohibiturum, effectively destroying all future publication.

20^th C
- During control by the Ensatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg of Germany,  during the reign of Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain (who is reputed to be still dead), during the so-called 'cultural blackout' in Chile, during wars perpetrated upon the Middle East, during Russian control of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania... and during varioius reigns of terror in the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of books were burned, bombed, destroyed... irretrievably erased from memory. This almost non-stop biblicaust was the first world-wide damnatio memoriae, It is in my opinion, more than the posturing of an 'information age', the true mark of twentieth century.
- Peter Abelard's poems and letters to Heloise were proscribed by a United States court because they offered an intellectual discussion of sex and gender roles which did not meet the court's 'Christian standards'. Not a book burning per say, but rather a suppression of knowledge and attempted daminatio memoria.
- Allegedly 'religious' groups in the United States and Britain successfully remove science from school curricula in several jurisdictions by putting it on an equal or sub-equal footing with the junk science of creationism, thereby effectively committing a softer albeit as effective type of auto-da-fe. Theophilis would have approved.
- Non-local history ceased to be a required subject in most school and post-secondary jurisdictions in many western countries, especially the most wealthy. This was so similar to the manner and modus of Mao and Stalin as to scarcely need comment. Other than the curriculum change from just 100 years earlier effectively erased the memory of entire generations. A true but subtle daminatio memoria.

 Our own time:
This long history of book burnings, censorship of thought, murder of scientists, attacks upon freedom of thought, burning of hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts is not over.  The concept of Librorum Prohibiturum has been adopted by most western countries (Australia's country-wide censorship initiative, the ACTA world-wide mass censorship initiative). As always, religious intolerance,  fiscal greed, fanaticism, and appalling historical ignorance  as to the effect censorship always has upon the ability of humanity to soar beyond the mundane.

It would not I feel, be amiss to suggest that that humanity, and the west in particular has always been and is, subject to mass bibliocausts. Those with power have so often perpetuated wanton destruction of ideas, and even the memory of ideas, that such destruction is today hardly noticed by a populous thoroughly acclimatized to bibliocaust. That which has become normative is largely invisible.  This is perhaps particularly so in an educational system which is itself largely devoid of memory, thanks in part to the  legacies of Bernays, Rogers, Durkheim, and their ilk and in part to the legacies implicated above. In the west history is seldom taught beyond that required for a rudimentary patriotism. In post-secondary institutions in North America, it is not required knowledge. A subtle but massive daminatio memoria.

 Update:
A couple of people have written to say that the internet by its very nature (i.e. the design of tcp/ip) cannot be controlled.  And moreover that it is the greatest force for the dissemination of knowledge in history. I would suggest that, unfortunately, this is likely incorrect. Should you also feel the internet is a strike against bibliocaust, you may enjoy a little research into deep packet inspection and the ease with which tcp packets can be redacted and revised en route regardless of the dissemination model in use (with some small caveat for TOR-like systems). You may also wish to peruse the academic literature currently emerging regarding the habitus (a term used in post-modernist sociology and social anthropology) as it pertains to pedagogic indoctrination.

Update 2:
Someone wrote to say (or more accurately insult with considerable vitriol) that the premise herein is incorrect. That educational systems, particularly western educational systems, are very much about freeing access to knowledge and not restricting same as I have suggested. If this is your opinion too, you may enjoy accessing the academic literature concerning the so-called 'hidden curriculum'. Particularly that part of the literature which deals with the formal study of mass indoctrination. Remember that the most successful methodologies for such are those which are dismissed as immaterial and sans need for further research.