Bibliocaust - bookburning, mass destruction of knowledge, and the erasure of memory
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." — Pravin Lal
1. Introduction
Much of George Orwell’s writing was as warning against those who sought to destroy knowledge and learning. He feared those who tried to ban books. Aldous Huxley however, feared something much more insidious. He was afraid that people would become so devoid of intellectual curiosity that there would be no reason to ban books - for there would be no one left who wished to learn or read them. He believed that the majority would become so distracted by trivia, by fear, by manipulation, that in their distraction the ability to learn, to think, to reason, would be lost.
IMHO Huxley was right. Certainly for the majority of the world’s population, and particularly for those in the west.
2. Bibliocaust defined
Throughout history access to knowledge has been carefully curtailed, redacted, revised, embellished, and filtered. Some people call this history, but I prefer the term “bibliocaust” - the wilful destruction and/or revision of knowledge to serve a particular end.
Bibliocaust curtails the basic human right to make informed decisions concerning events. Over the centuries hundreds of millions of books have been destroyed for this reason [1]. 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. In our own time, this fine tradition has continued not only with material items, but with digital information. More on this later.
For the moment, we can say that the root cause of bibliocaust is the so-called daminatio memoria. This is 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 Spain’s genocide [2] of the native population was designed in large part to eradicate the idea that there could be an alternate world model (i.e. something other than the Spanish version of Christianity) under which people could live.
For more than the mere censorship of knowledge destruction (bibliocaust), daminatio memoria seeks to completely eradicate any hint of contrary viewpoints or that contrary viewpoints ever existed. A modern example: The Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act in the United States not only restrict dissemination of formerly free information (bibliocaust), but also prevent those who know what was restricted from ever talking about it (daminatio memoria) [3]. Many other countries, (Canada [4], Australia [5], France [ibid], Britain [6], Germany [7], Japan [8], etc.) have similar legislation in place.
Bibliocaust and daminatio memoria range from the relatively simple physical destruction of books or information on a hard drive, to the far more subtle inculcation of school children to a lack of desire for knowledge or to a blind acceptance of the ’party line’. The first concerns Orwell’s warning; the second, Huxley’s.
This second type of more subtle bibliocaust can be perpetuated in organizations such as Hitler Youth [9], Mao’s “corrections” [10], or the modern variants guised for example, as military training for children (i.e. anyone under 21 years of age) [ibid]. This more subtle type of bibliocaust is a tightly controlled enforced system of mass “education”. The propaganda of extreme patriotism perpetuated by Durkeim, Bernays, Maslow, and their ilk in North America, Britain, and elsewhere (see my page
on illiteracy) is exemplary in this regard.
I would call this an a priori bibliocaust - knowledge destruction via the two-fold control of
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the instillation of antipathy to learning, and
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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"), imbecilic 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.
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives."—John Lennon [11]
On this webpage by way of introduction to the topic of bibliocaust and its results 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. And which has accelerated in our own time.
3. Previous Millennia
“The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe”. -Dr. L. McCoy, Star Trek IV
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 under 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 for a longer period of time than anywhere else on the planet.
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, where religion is used as a means of
mass persuasion - simply another arm of effective propaganda.
Examples abound for our own time, from the destruction of Poland’s unique library collections by the Nazis [12], the more recent bombing of the libraries of Serbia by the cluster bombs of freedom and righteousness [13], the massive (sometimes even complete) redactions allowed under so-called ’Freedom of Information’ laws in several countries [14,15,16,17,18], or the current mass historical revisionism [15,16,19,20,21] of nations whose economy is so dependent upon perpetuating
permanent war for oil. More on this later, but for now the short table below is part of a much more detailed one which I published a couple of decades ago. But I feel it none-the-less gives the flavour of the long march of bibliocaust throughout history:
2st 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 [22,23]. 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 [22,24,25].
3rd C
- Christian monks seized the scientist Hypatia (
whom I discuss here) and burned all scientific works they could find [26]. 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 [27]. He was made a saint by the Church, setting a precedent still followed to this day [28].
4th C
- Christian priests burned to the ground the Library of Antioch [29], 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 [30]. The fact that no early Christians considered him to be a god or even the son of a god [31,32, 33] has been rather conveniently erased from cannon law.
5th C
- Christian monks and priests under Theophilus destroyed the library where Hypatia had once taught [34]. 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” [35].
6th - 8th C
- The Council of Trullo, in Canon LXII of 691, forbade any Christian from representing or writing comedy [36]. 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 write 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 [37]. 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 [38]. 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.
12th C
- Pope Innocent III ordered all of Peter Abelard’s works burnt [39]. Abelard had dared to publish a scholarly discussion of philosophical ideas which the Church deemed to be heresy. Fortunately they did not get all of them, and some of Abelard’s brilliant work still survives.
13th 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 [40]. Most of the works therein were permanently lost to history.
15th C
- Francisco Jimnez de Cisnero, Archbishop of Toledo ordered the burning of all Qurans [41]. In all more than 5000 were burned in an auto-da-fe [ibid]. 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 [ibid, 42]. Gone forever. Jimnez was reward for his bookburning by being made a Cardinal (akin to a company vice president) of the church.
16th C
- Pope Leo X prohibited dissemination or reading of any of Luthor’s (not Lex Luthor, haha!) writings [43]. 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 [ibid].
- Juan de Zum, Bishop of Mexico ordered the destruction of all Aztec books [44]. 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. But essentially the legacy and history of an entire civilization was erased by this find Bishop of the Church.
- The Church under Pope Paul IV published the Index Librorum Prohibiturum – a list of prohibited books [45]. 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, as indicated below.
- 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 [46]. He and his monks ensured that everything was destroyed, burning and killing so that today a mere three codices remain.
18th C
- Copies of Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters were destroyed by the Church [47].
- Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques in which atheism was discussed as viable were publicly burned [48].
- Many books, including Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws were added to the Librorum Prohibiturum, effectively destroying all future publication [49].
19th C
- One small example to represent the whole of this century. This example IMHO typifies what was occurring in under the rule of the British Raj and its inheritors, around the world:
"The Concord Public Library has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The librarian and other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people." --Boston Transcript, March 17, 1885 [50]
4. The Twentieth Century
- Hundreds of millions of books were burned, bombed, destroyed in:
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Germany: (during the Ensatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg); [51]
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Spain: (during the reign of Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain [52] - the Generalissimo incidentally is rumoured to be still dead),
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Chile: during the so-called ’cultural blackout’ [53]
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Middle East: during the oil wars [54]
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Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania: during Russian invasions [55,56]
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Romania: during the reign of terror [57]
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Burma: during SLORK’s long dictatorship and mass censorship [58,59,60]
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China: during Mao’s cultural genocides [61,62]
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... and so many more (see [63])
- Thee simple examples:
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- Peter Abelard’s poems and letters to Heloise were proscribed by a United States court [64] because they offered an intellectual discussion of sex and gender roles which did not meet the court’s imaginary ’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 [66,67], 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 [68]. 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.
- Literally hundreds of millions of books were purposefully destroyed during this century ... irretrievably erased from memory. Entire cultural and historical contexts were weeded out and destroyed.
- Sometimes it is not governments or religions or war which create bibliocaust, but organizations which believe they are right and everyone else (despite factual evidence to the contrary) is wrong. One small example of this in the 20thC was the Librorum Prohibiturum (though not called that) published by a widely read (in the United States) colloquium of so-called conservative thought. This publication [69] during the latter part of the century produced a list of those books which they believed have been harmful. They also claimed that the list was judged by “eminent scholars”. Any books which appear on this list are automatically censored by a fairly large number of school boards in the United States (i.e. removed from school libraries, curricula, etc.). Going one step further that the U.S. bibliocaust, Canada prevented any publication of the fact that they had banned these books [70] or any others seized at the border (i.e. a daminatio memoria). I have selected a sample selection of such “harmful books” below:
The long biblicaust which occurred during the 20thc CE was the first world-wide damnatio memoriae. It is in my opinion, the true mark of the twentieth century. All the while the mythos of an ’information age’ took hold in the western press which was oblivious to, or simply ignored, the massive world-wide bibliocaust going on under their noses.
5. The Twenty-First Century
“Questions are a danger to you, and a burden to others” — Eugene H. Crabs
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. In fact the Church’s concept of Librorum Prohibiturum discussed above has been adopted by many countries around the world:
5.1 War-and-profit:
One million books, 10 million documents and 14,000 archaeological artefacts were lost or stolen during the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq [72,73,74,75].
This was arguably largest loss of information (books, documents, etc.) since the descendants of Genghis Khan destroyed Baghdad in 1258.
The historian Fernando Baez (see also Marquez’s excellent supportive research) has alleged that the invading soldiers regularly sold looted artefacts at the borders with Jordan and Kuwait, where art merchants paid as much as $57,000 for a Sumerian tablet [76]. The 5,200-year-old sculpture ’Lady of Warka’, which is one of the earliest known representations of the human face and worth $100 to $150 million, was also taken [77].
All in clear violation of the Hague Convention of 1954. Interestingly following publication of his research into this matter, Dr. Baez was denied the right to enter the U.S. or its territories, doubtless a mere coincidence.
5.2 No-recourse:
In Nazi Germany, Fatherland Security banned various types of communications, books, and scientific data-sharing. All on the sole say-so of some unelected anonymous bureaucrats, with no appeal possible and no judicial over-site.
Fast foreword a few decades and we find some random country’s Homeland Security department banning various types of communications, books, and scientific data-sharing on the sole say-so of some unelected anonymous bureaucrats, with no appeal possible and little or no judicial over-site. Daminatio memoria as history repeats.
One example: 84,000 entirely legal and legitimate domains (websites) were shut down “by accident” by said anonymous bureaucrats [71]. Who did it, why, and who gave censorship authority to these people is at time of writing, highly classified (i.e. censored) information. These bureaucrats shortly thereafter claimed that linking to copyrighted material on a website (i.e. the very nature of how the Internet works), was a crime. This was so inane and anti-democratic that one cannot but wonder if said unelected, anonymous bureaucrats were committing a sin de industria - i.e. a sin committed in malice and full knowledge of what one is doing.
As with all such erasures throughout history, no judicial recourse was possible for the innocent people effected by these erasures.
5.3 Super-injunctions:
Several national governments have implemented so-called ’super-injunctions’. These prevent a defendant - such as a reporter - from disclosing the very existence of a trial, the name of his accuser, or even the fact that he is being tried.
In some countries super-injunctions are part of omnibus legislation [78]. The redoubtable U.S. Patriot Act [79] for example, which forbids authors from revealing that they have been forbidden to publish factual information). And forbids individuals from revealing that they have been ordered to give private personal data on others to government agents [ibid]. In other countries (Canada, Sweden, Germany, etc.), super-injunctions are simple addenda to long-standing laws.
Super-injunctions have been used by the rich and powerful to further their own ends. For example, some soccer players have paid the high legal fees to have super-injunctions prevent individuals with whom they have allegedly had illicit sexual liaisons, from talking about such liaisons [80,81].
In sum super-injunctions have been used to prevent publication of information, but to also to prevent the very existence of knowledge that such publications are banned, or even that they exist. They are therefore, a priori bibliocaust.
5.4 Secret-blacklists:
Censorship blacklists have been growing around the world, a modern Librorum Prohibiturum.
Some examples:
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A hockey loving country has blacklisted a plethora of books (the famous ’Little Sisters’ case is a prime example), despite Supreme Court directives to the contrary [82,83]. A hamburger loving country has blacklisted a number of works pertaining to war crimes by its troops [84].
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A certain baguette-loving country has pioneered laws which prevent details of such censorship blacklists as well as details of the laws regarding them from public knowledge - they have made it illegal to ask for the details of these laws [85,86,87]. (Interestingly the Minister responsible for final decisions on this destruction of knowledge is the same person who declared Open Office to be a good "high performance firewall". It is of course not a firewall at all, but rather merely a word processor [86]. Perhaps censorship and ignorance go hand in hand, n’est pas?)
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Not to be outdone, Turkey’s BTK pushed through regulations forcing every Internet user in Turkey to submit to extensive content filtering, though who was filtered, who did the filtering, what sites were filtered, or what the secret blacklists contained was forbidden to public scrutiny [88].
Update: Since I wrote the foregoing many countries around the world, particularity in democracies, have been censoring the internet. The U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, India (where Communications & Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal ordered Facebook, Google, YouTube and Yahoo to censor content), Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Germany, the United States, New Zealand... etc. have implemented blacklists concerning published works, both digital or analogue. In all cases, the blacklists are almost entirely without appeal or available for public examination. Look again at the list I gave above of some of the books blacklisted and banned in the United States during the 20th century, which have been almost universally recognized as some of the greatest works of in history.
Blacklists are bibliocaust.
5.5 Persecution-of-whistle-blowers:
Persecution of whistle-blowers reached into many venues in the early part of the 21st CE.
Those who release information regarding government lies, corruption, war crimes, and trampling of human rights have been threatened with assassination and death [89,90,91,92,93]. Some have been kept under electronic house arrest without ever being charged with any crime [91]. Others have merely been killed [92,93,94]. There have been attempts to manufacture false information and feed it to whistle-blower organizations so as to discredit them [91,95,96].
Financial institutions (banks, online money exchange, etc.) have been joining government in creating fiscal embargoes so that money necessary to publish or distribute information from whistle-blowers is unavailable [157, 158, 159]. Employees are secretly monitored by such tools SureView which monitors behaviour to predict who might be a potential whistle-blower [154]). T
he doublespeak message from governments is that whistle-blowers who reveals government crimes and wrongdoing are somehow magically more guilty of high crimes and misdemeanour than those who actually commit said crimes. And so the propaganda would have one believe that those who reveals that torture of innocents [97,98,99,100,101] including children [ibid] to be commonplace in by some countries, are somehow more culpable than the actual perpetrators of these horrific crimes.
Interestingly one of the whistle-blowers who revealed this information was awarded the Australian Peace Prize. At the time he was arrested in Britain for revealing the alleged British role in the torture of innocent people [102].
In South Africa Zuma’s official spokesman Mac Maharaj, ordered the Mail & Guardian to redact ~70% of an article about Maharaj’s alleged lies vis-a-vis alleged arms dealing [170] setting the precedent for the state to redact any information it did not like. The same holds true to varying extents for most of the world’s governments, and restrictions in Britain, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. are gaining in strength [171] and extent with each passing year.
In the past, publishers of Galileo’s books were charged with high crimes because they disseminated truth (i.e. the earth was but one of several planets). This has not changed in modern times, for “Shoot the messenger” is and has always been, a dominant mantra of bibliocaust. It has been said time and time again by historians, that only tyrannies silence whistle-blowers.
“I think it’s outrageous - the Bush people have been let off. [others] got immunity. The only people ... prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.” — Mark Klein, who uncovered widespread allegedly illegal U.S. government and corporate wiretapping [103]
5.6 Killing-websites:
In some countries, on the say-so of large corporations alone can terminate access to information. Largely without judicial oversight.
For example, the government of a small insignificant island somewhere west of France has allegedly made a valiant effort to emulate North Korean practices regarding freedom of thought and freedom of access to information. They have forced several websites to shut down and refused related FOI (Freedom Of Information) requests [104], all for the sin on the part of the site owners of being critical of several demonstrably allegedly illegal actions [105] of police forces in that country.
Not to be outdone, cabinet ministers in a European government has passed a bill to block any domain/website in the world from being viewed by their citizens on the say-so of the cabinet or its ministers [106], without any need to justify his actions. A UK High Court judge has ruled that the largest British ISP must block access sites website which provides links to alleged copyrighted material owned by giant U.S. corporations [107,108] - that is to say, allegedly mandating spying on all Internet activity by private companies on behalf of giant for-profit foreign corporations. The corporate-tied group BREIN convinced Dutch courts to require Usenet providers to ensure that no copyrighted material appear on their servers [168]. This is impossible of course, due to the very nature of how the network is constructed. Further, the court order occurred in the absence of proof that BREINs allegations were to be considered correct. Within days the largest EU Usenet provider, News-Service.com terminated its services [169].
Note that all of the foregoing give those in power a wonderful means of blocking any embarrassing details of government wrongdoings from a country’s delicate citizens under a false flag rubric of “fighting terrorism”, “protecting copyright”, “protecting the children” and so on without any appeal or proof of their allegations. This is almost by definition, bibliocaust.
Update: The United States [110], Germany [91,111], Canada [109], New Zealand [112], Australia [113], Spain [174], ... the list goes on... have all joined in passing laws emulating the efforts of these trailblazers. In addition to the banning of tens of thousands of domains cited in 5.2 above, the U.S. has recently allegedly had all major search engines in that country remove many links to parts of the internet [172, 173] without public oversight or discussion. In no case was appeal possible. Almost all were de-listed for allegedly violating some U.S. record company’s right to charge for songs. Displaying the ignorance common to all bibliocaust, the wise lawmakers seemed unaware that other search engines in other countries could be used to easily circumvent the alleged Google, Yahoo, etc. de-listing.
In other similar alleged attempts at no-appeal mass censorship, the EU during negotiations held by LEWP (closed to the general public), had been hard at work to implement a Europe-wide firewall virtually identical in technology and scope to that used by China [114]. China as you may know, was not a country celebrated for its lack of corruption or its great human rights efforts. LEWP’s purpose was to to censor and block all ‘illicit’ websites [ibid].
Bookburning (denying access to information) without appeal or public oversight runs directly contrary the UN declaration that free and open (uncensored) access to the Internet to be a basic human right [115].
5.7 War-and-destruction:
According to several United Nations reports the U.S. military purposefully destroyed archaeological sites of immense historical importance [116,117,118,119].
For example, most of what remained of King Nebuchadnezzar’s guest palace in Babylon, a 4,000 year old site filled with writings, was bulldozed by the U.S. military to construct parking lots for their vehicles [116,118].
Bricks containing irreplaceable cuneiform writings were pulverized by these same enlightened forces.
Four thousand years of human history were destroyed forever. Because as you will know, military parking lots are so much more important than civilization. Or civilized behaviour. The U.S. may be therefore be guilty of the foulest of biblocausts, the purposeful destruction of irreplaceable knowledge.
5.8 Banning-journalism:
Embedding journalists in during wars has three purposes: 1) It ensures nothing will be seen or reported upon by the embedded reporter which the military does not wish them to see; 2) it ensures that the military has control over who, how many, and where journalists are at any given moment; and 3) it ensures that communiques are first read (and revised) by military censors.
Journalists who refuse these conditions are forbidden military protection whilst reporting, or even arrested on site if found in the largely arbitrary “no-go” zones set up by the military. These are old and well tried techniques, and ensure the press is limited - i.e.. bibliocaust. This goes much further however, for entire governments have embedded news media. In the a major hamburger loving country for example [120,121]:
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military and security “advisors” check news stories in many major media [160, 161] before they are published, just as was done in the Soviet Union or China.
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Some nations’ governments, have even passed laws (or in one case a Presidential Directive) which allow the executive branch to block, remove, or inhibit any information from any website, book, film, video, or news report which nameless officials in the Executive Branch do not like [ibid].
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Photojournalists are arrested under anti-terrorism laws for taking pictures of buildings [162];
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photojournalists have been arrested under these laws for photographing police beating a man to death [163];
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journalists have been prevent from covering wars unless a military censor vets everything they write [164, 165, 166, 167].
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and much more.
All of which of course has a chilling effect on journalism. This extends to news organizations - for example on former democracy has done everything it can to prevent AJE (Al-Jazeera English news) from access by the majority of its citizenry [122]. AJE has been one of the very few world-wide news organizations which has received awards for the quality, fairness, and balance of its reporting [123].
The laws which enable such bibliocaust are seldom or never discussed or mentioned in
mainstream media, for obvious reasons. (See also “banning-war-crime-evidence”, below.)
5.9 Burning-art:
Sometimes religious groups burn art. Burning books depicting the face of some religion’s Arabic-speaking Prophet, has been a popular pastime for centuries [124]. Sometimes corporations do the burning.
For example the Disney corporation’s well known legal efforts to suppress depictions of Mickey Mouse by cartoonist Dan O’Neill [125,126]. And sometimes it is governments.
Or take the largely unknown case of artist Franke James by way of example [127]: Ms. James was set to do a solo art exhibition of her work, much of it concerning environmental themes, in 20 European cities, a major career event for any artist. Unfortunately Prime Minister Harper’s Republican Party of Canada (her home country) allegedly took exception to her message and work on behalf of the environment particularly her citing studies indicating Canada had become
one of the world's worst polluters. They allegedly contacted her corporate sponsors, Canadian embassies in Europe, NGOs, and others to cancel her funding. The result? Ms. James was unable to conduct her art show and tour, despite her work having been supported by many including Latvian, Croatian, and other art and environment government ministries. This same government had earlier cut most funding to the arts whilst allegedly increasing military funding to the highest level in history.
Another quick example: In Australia, internationally acclaimed and multi-award wining author/cartoonist Robert Crumb was funded by the Opera House and endorsed by the City of Sydney to visit Sydney’s graphic arts festival [128]. The details are unimportant here, but suffice it to say that in an alleged character assassination attempt by Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Telegraph, Mr. Crumb was allegedly forced to cancel the trip for fear he might come to physical harm [129].
Bibliocaust of the arts without appeal or recourse, has always been the the watchword of the powerful, for obvious reasons.
5.10 Search-engines:
In China the majority of people believe that Fang Binxing’s country-wide censorship system is for curtailing pornography only [130]. They do not believe that political discussion, blogs, websites, and such are heavily censored [ibid]. They do not believe this because Fang’s Great Firewall is selective - it dynamically censors small parts of blogs and websites [ibid, 131,132]. It cuts gently. Hence very few notice the mass censorship which is always in effect.
Similarly in other countries, software which allows governments to with relative ease ban access to information is seldom if ever noticed by the majority. This software - censorware - is sold by several corporations in the west, mainly out of the United States. These corporations have with impunity sold such software to dictatorships in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Burma, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, North Korea, and many others [ibid]. Claims by these corporations that they have no control over how their products are used, are ludicrous. Particularly since all said software depends upon timely and in many cases, daily updates from head office.
In the west search engines also routinely cut gently, as mentioned above. But they also show different information to different people performing the same search, depending upon the profiles they have previously built up of the searchers [133]. Based upon your previous search, purchasing, gender, credit, socio-economic, voting, geolocation, scholastic, and other histories, search software from Bing to Google allegedly tailor results - you will not be presented with results that do not fit your profile [134].
All western search engines promote items their algorithms think you will like, and demote (effectively filtering) things their algorithms feel you will not like, thereby limiting your exposure to opposing or dissenting information. This is essentially a soft form of Fang Binxing’s censorship, and as with the Chinese masses, most in the west are utterly unaware their searches are filtered.
In both cases, to knowingly aid in the prevention of free and open access to all information is by its very nature, bibliocaust.
5.11 Muzzling-scientists:
Please see my page entitled ’
What is Science’ for several examples of state suppression and censorship of science in the 21
stcentury.
As that page indicates, denial of scientific freedom and limiting the propagation of scientific discussion and knowledge by many governments around the world is increasing. Rapidly. Particularly in
ostensibly democratic countries. Suppression of science is growing such that many scientists are now afraid to speak [119, 122].
Censorship of science is bookburning at its most reprehensible, for it is a march backwards toward the dark ages where political and religious ideas - which are ultimately identical - trump rationality.
5.12 Trusted computing:
Governments around the world have been producing “studies” and “recommendations” that chips be installed in all computers to effectively do two things: 1) allow government to access all data on a given computer and 2) denies access to anyone lacking appropriate biometric, chip, or paper credentials issued by the government. Similarly no government services could be accessed online without the user’s computer having appropriate credentials.
Britain has been a leader in this effort [154, 155], followed closely by the United States [155]. Of course those without said credentials would not be allowed to access the services which their tax dollar pays for other than by lining up at a government office somewhere, nor could they use their own computers without appropriate credentials.
The implications of this scheme for freedom of information and subsequent bibliocaust, are obvious.
5.13 Self-censorship:
Self-censorship is an a prior bibliocaust.
If a person does not share information for fear she may be attacked, jailed, or even killed for so doing, then she is self-censoring. A paper in the U.S. Homeland Security Affairs Journal has suggested that self-censorship should be promoted as a civic-duty [143]. The paper suggest that amateur astronomers, Geologic Survey publications, newspapers and journalists, food researchers,... and many others should self-censor what they say and write as a civic (patriotic) duty. This was, as you may recall, a fundamental tenet of the egregious destruction of human rights under McCarthyism in the U.S., communist rule in Soviet state, fascist policy under Mussolini, and standard procedure under Hitler. Sadly those in power rather than turn away from this censorship, embraced it as more and more countries internalize the mind-set of the former Soviet Union and the U.S. McCarthy era, the mission-creep of self-generated bibliocaust becomes increasingly likely.
An example: In Canada an Omnibus Crime Bill [144] and Bill C-52 [145] (I will consider them as one bill here), was introduced. It gave unelected and unnamed government bureaucrats the power to force ISPs to design their networks with backdoors (secret access ports) for government officials to spy on all communication by citizens.
All without judicial or public oversight and without warrant. It also gave these same bureaucrats the power to demand ISPs and phone companies turn over all information they had on any individuals.These two aspects of the Bill effectively eliminated the basic human right of privacy, but also to anonymity. It therefore undermined the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which states “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: . . . freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including the freedom of the press and other media of communication” [146].
Suppose you run a website with a comments section. And that someone in a comment inserts a link to a website dealing with defamatory speech. Under these Bills these same anonymous bureaucrats could get the home address of the person hosting the website from her ISP, and arrest her under the powers of the Bills for aiding and abetting the incitement of hatred. Now eventually the courts would probably throw the case out. But for the years that may take (there are long waits for court dates) the innocent website owner is in jail or under house arrest, her employer may no longer trust her and so she looses her job, her children are taunted as school, her reputation is permanently sullied, and so on.
Hence rather than face this many will self-censor and not speak up. Which of course, is the alleged underlying purpose of these sections of the Bills. As I write similar laws have already been enacted in Britain, Japan, Germany, the United States, Italy, France... and pretty much all of the western world. Notice how easily it would be to suppress any dissent in this manner. Bibliocaust has historically gone hand in hand with the suppression of dissent. Very sad to see this repeated in our own time.
"You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen” — Bertold Brecht [147]
5.14 Banning-war-crime-evidence:
After his invasion of France, Adolf Hitler banned any publication of photographs of his soldiers’ violently abusing and torturing captives [135]. Fast foreword a few decades: The government of the country with the world’s largest military has prohibited and classified release of photographs [136] or videos. This evidence allegedly shows that country’s soldiers, contractors, mercenaries, and other citizens allegedly violently abusing and torturing captives, burning alive the inhabitants of entire towns, and many other alleged war crimes [137].
That country has also brought suit against some authors who, after leaving military service, sought to publish memoirs containing unclassified and perfectly legal material about what really happened [138] and the alleged war crimes in which they were forced to participate [ibid]. And used the Espionage Act against those who sought to make knowledge of the U.S. alleged widespread use of torture, available to its the citizens in whose name such illegal means of force were allegedly used [187]. It has also been alleged that rather strong and sometimes violent action has been taken against journalists attempting to release photographic proof of alleged wide scale civilian slaughter by that country’s military [139,140,141,142].
In the past bibliocaust was almost exclusively concerned with literature. In the current century however, it has been extended to images as well.
Finally, a modern note: In recent years four U.S. Presidents, four UK Prime Ministers have been charged with alleged genocide [188, 189], alleged crimes against humanity, and alleged war crimes [188, 190, 191, 192]. Additionally a Canadian Prime Minister has been placed under official war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court [193, 194]. Efforts by many [195] to obtain pertinent documents and interviews were allegedly met with obstructionism, destruction of evidence [196] and pertinent emails [197], or worse. Very sad to see this form of bibliocaust so common in former times, resurected in our own.
As always throughout history, those with power attempt to suppress the facts of their war crimes and crimes against humanity.
5.15 Many-fronted-attack:
A few examples:
-
Australia’s massive country-wide censorship initiatives give Oz the dubious honour of having the largest most pervasive censorship of any western country (UPDATE: now eclipsed by the United States, Britain, Japan, and Germany - Oz will have to try harder to beat these other contenders).
-
The egregious ACTA laws signed by most western democracies, and its subsequent derivative initiatives, to allegedly install a coordinated world-wide universal censorship/spy system under the false-flag rubric of “protecting copyright”; ACTA is a in international version of the U.S. DMCA laws, but with many additional censorship powers - it is a very, very powerful tool for censoring anything governments or large corporations do not like, without recourse to the courts. The censorship extends to what may be written in books, parodies, plays, etc. - it is all encompassing.
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Curtailment of freedom of speech via ’free-speech zones’.
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Usurpation of the academic peer review process by corporations; laws by and for corporate entities.
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A world wide chilling of academic freedoms.
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Social media sites claiming they, not the individual, own the individuals data, emails, comments, etc..
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Pharmaceutical corporations have the right in law to own the blood taken from individuals while in hospital, to do with as they wish.
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Groups such as the ’Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science’ allegedly lobbying to prevent open publication and free dissemination of knowledge in the sciences.
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And so very more ad nauseam.
-
Much (all?) of this legislative effort at banning data exchange and access is at the behest of private for profit groups. The U.S.’s DCMA and the Protect IP Act, UK’s Digital Economy Act, France’s ‘Hadopi’ legislation, similar laws in Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Canada, Brazil, ... and so on allow banning of various forms of data sharing and supplanting the rights of the individuals who created or produced said data from all of their rights to it. Even to the extent of banning access to the internet, imposing jail time, and other penalties. This legislated censorship (usually with no citizen input) is, according to the United Nations, a violation of basic human rights. It is also a particularly clear violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which all of the countries which are parties to enacting these censorship laws, are signatories.
Criminalization of the dissemination of information particularly pertaining to government wrongdoing, and removing the rights of individuals to access their own data, represents a particularly vicious form of bibliocast.
5.16 Killing the Internet
In 1994, the year it was privatized, only about 10 million people used the internet. At time of writing however, more than two and a half billion (2,500,000,000) people used the net, with more than 500,000 new additions every day. The internet provides a potential for unprecedented access to information. Yet the current tragedy unfolding is the every increasing effort to censor the net, restrict access to information, and actively prevent participation in the free exchange of ideas by many governments world wide. The reason for this massive censorship effort is a simple one, and one at the core of bibliocaust throughout history:
The net has the potential to provide free access to
accurate information.
Accurate information is antithetical to propaganda, whether from government, industry, or military groups. It is this
accurate information which can come under attack from those in power, not information in general. There are several steps to restrict free access to
accurate information, all of which are currently being used ranging from legal restrictions on anonymous communication to manipulating search engine results so as to significantly lower the rank of some sites with
accurate information (such as Badu and many others, yes even the best known ones in formerly
democratic countries, do routinely).
Yet despite the obvious benefits of free access to information, the
bibliocaust continues. Many members of the United Nations - China, Russia, India, etc. - have been moving to redraft the 1988 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) [198]. The redrafting would Impose unprecedented economic regulations on the internet, give corporations a larger role in charging for use of the internet, and enable full time surveillance of all traffic. Added to the ACTA and other treaties discussed above and elsewhere on this site, this would effectively limit internet content in many ways. And enable filters similar to the so-called Great Firewall of China to be imposed by governments around the world.
“In a free society we’re supposed to know the truth.... in a society where the truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble.” — R. Paul [148], U.S. politician
Yet unlike the message corporate and government censors proselytize, the internet is not merely a content delivery network for movie and recording industries, news media, and politicians. That is what television has become - a medium whose content is controlled by a handful of powerful corporations in most countries, and military and government in others. Rather the internet has the potential for true free speech, exchange of ideas, and levelling of the hierarchical structures upon which dominance by a few depend. Current world-wide efforts to censor and limit this are succeeding, largely in the face of an oblivious citizenry. A massive and largely invisible bibliocaust. Very sad.
6. Conclusion
Ignorance is endemic in modern society. I do not mean the ignorance which comes from lack of access to education, but rather the ignorance of those so thoroughly acculturated to
lack of thought, intelligent discourse, and learning for its own sake that questioning the prevailing Weltanschauung never occurs. Both Orwell’s and Huxley’s fears have come to pass. There is a wilful and virulent ontology of anti-intellectualism which not only does not resist the mass censorship and bibliocaust previously indicated, but welcomes it. The Christian fundamentalist proudly proclaims that there is no need to study science for their Bible is the only truth they need. The politician proudly declares some oil rich country must be invaded to “bring them democracy”. And so on. Rationality has been replaced by infantile expression and recitation of the formulaic credos of the propagandist. While on this short page I have described mainly Orwell’s fear, this infantile rejection of thought is Huxlean bibliocaust writ large.
Well, as always throughout history, bibliocast, censorship, and ignorance go hand in hand. Whether guided by religious intolerance, corporate fiscal greed, perverse fanaticism, or perhaps most of all a pervading and appalling historical ignorance, suppression of knowledge is also the destruction of the right of informed choice. And as shown throughout history, mass censorship, Librorum Prohibiturum, and bibliocaust have always limited the ability of society and indeed of humanity as a whole, to soar beyond the mundane.
It would not I feel, be amiss to suggest that humanity and the west in particular has always been and is, ever more frequently subject to mass bibliocausts. Those with power whether secular or religious potentates have so often perpetuated wanton destruction of ideas, even the memory of ideas. To such an extent that today the ongoing bibliocaust is hardly noticed by a populous thoroughly acclimatized and normalized to revisionism and redaction and most of all, Emery’s theory of social turbulence.
In the west history is seldom taught beyond that required for a coarse and rudimentary patriotism. In post-secondary institutions in North America, it is not required knowledge. A subtle but massive daminatio memoria.
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. The educational system in the west churns out illiterate certificate holders so steeped in the doxa that most never notice the lack. This is Huxley’s nightmare.
“The wheel of time turns, moving from one age to the next. History falls to myth, myth to legend, legend to half remembered tales spoken around the fire, and eventually, long after even that is forgotten, that age comes again.” — Robert Jordan [153]
7. Updates:
7.1 Update 1:
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 and a misunderstanding of how network routing actually works. Further, many western countries have mandated backdoors in network appliances. The examples of Egypt [149], Greece [150], Saudi Arabia [ibid], North Korea [151], and other make it clear that depriving citizens of the basic human right to access information and communicate with one another is not all that difficult. Particularly when the giant corporations supplying network backbone infrastructures have on the whole been more than willing to aid in implementing control systems for dictators and elected officials alike.
In former times shutting down and restricting access to information meant burning books. In our own time it means creating so-called ’internet kill switches’ currently being implemented by many governments. Either way, the result is bibliocaust. Should you feel none the less that 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, particularly regarding engineering and computer science.
“Our number one enemy is ignorance” — Julian Assange [152]
7.2 Update 2:
Someone wrote to say (or more accurately, to insult with considerable vitriol - a teacher?) that the premise herein is incorrect. That educational systems, particularly western educational systems, are and have always been 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, propaganda, and social engineering. You may also wish to ponder the idea that the most successful methodologies of censorship are those which are dismissed as immaterial and hence sans any need for further research.
Bibliocaust and daminatio memoria guarantee that the horrors of history will repeat.
7.3 Update 3:
Since I wrote the foregoing bibliocaust has been proceeding nicely around the world. India has enacted mass censorship laws concern access to online information [182] as have China [188], Burma [189], Russia [190], Japan [191], and so on. Sadly this has been eclipsed in many ways by the United States Politicians there have been allegedly given almost one billion dollars [175, 176] in “donations” by giant multinationals [178] which have resulted in enacting laws [179] which would severely limit the exchange of information [180, 181]. Copycat laws have been enacted in Canada [183] (viz. Bill C-11’s digital lock rules [184] and others - see Geist [185] for a good summary).
“The potential for abuse of power through digital networks – upon which we as citizens now depend for nearly everything, including our politics – is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age … This is no time for politicians and industry lobbyists in Washington to be devising new Internet censorship mechanisms, adding new opportunities for abuse of corporate and government power over online speech.” - Rebecca MacKinnon [186], New York Times
“It contains provisions that will chill innovation. It contains provisions that will tinker with the fundamental fabric of the internet. It gives private corporations the power to censor. And best of all, it bypasses due legal process to do much of it.” - James Allworth [187], Harvard Business School
