Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack | Hacker News Reader

Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack

literaryreview.co.uk

51 pointspseudolus11 comments

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!

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)

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

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

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’."

There is also cancellation.

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".

Those two are completely different sins - even putting aside that "cancel culture" as a term is about whose ox is gored. Fire a teacher for once having done porn in college or expel a student because their mother works as a stripper and they call it "community standards". Or for approving of gay marriage back in the 80s or 90s. But when they get fired for wearing blackface, or supporting literal genocide suddently it is cancel culture out of control. Their complaints aren't that the game is fucked up but that they aren't winning anymore.

Judging the past by the standards of today may be fallacious (said complaints ignore contemparies pointing out how fucked up it was meaning the ideas certainly were conceivable) but it is discrediting and not the erasure of knowledge of book burning.

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.

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...

>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.

I don't get how surveillance capitalism remotely qualifies as a threat in that area - putting aside the ambiguity of the term. (It encompasses red light cameras, government wiretapping and analysis tools, and shopping recommendation algorithims.) Chilling effect is the best I can think of.

Really the answer to the issues for public postings and archival is a DYI ethos and a willingness to buy storage in bulk and archive everything you consider important. The time has never been better for preservation.

> 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

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