Libricide: the regime sponsored destruction of books and libraries in the twentieth century

Abstract

This book stresses the dichotomy: book destruction by 'natural' disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes versus book destruction by human agents as a result of systematic looting, bombing, and burning. If the former cannot be avoided in most cases, the latter involves a deliberate violent act, a barbaric attack by humans against human culture. 'Libricide' implies slaughter. Rebecca Knuth, Associate Professor at the Library and Information Science Program, University of Hawaii Manoa, chose this term to designate 'large-scale, regime-sanctioned destruction of books and libraries, purposeful initiatives that were designed to advance shortand long-term ideologically driven goals' (p. viii) during the twentieth century. Equating libricide to genocide and ethnocide, the author analyzes cases of intentional book 'killings' within the context of socio-cultural violations committed during periods of war or civil unrest. The reasons libraries have become targets of extreme violence is that they stand for symbols of national cultural identity, they are repositories of local history and collective memory, they represent belief systems, and they reflect the development of a society at a certain point in time. Totalitarian regimes perceive library collections as tools that can undermine or reinforce the ideology of a ruling class or party. When libraries are seen as potential enemies adverse to political goals and missions of authoritarian governments' they become candidates for vandalism, decimation, and pillage. Knuth considers censorship as a form of knowledge massacre. The use of governmentsponsored censorship with the purpose to extinguish culture is discussed through case studies from various parts of the world; from Nazi Germany during World War II, when Hitler's regime 'purified' libraries of Jewish texts and 'looted, destroyed and pulped' libraries of Germanoccupied territories as part of a well designed strategy to create a homogeneous state, to Maoist China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution aimed at a wide-scale dissemination of Marxist literature to serve the propagandistic efforts for mass indoctrination. Illustrations of atrocities committed against book collections by the Chinese communists in Tibet to eradicate the deeply rooted traditional culture, by the Iraqis in Kuwait during the six-month occupation during the first Gulf War when 43 per cent of the book collections in this country were slaughtered, and by the Serbs in Bosnia where the cultural heritage of the Bosnian Muslim, Croats, and Slovenes was reduced to nothing, constitute the background for the development of Knuth's theoretical framework for libricide. In her view, the development of a society and of a culture is reflected in the growth of libraries, thus the disappearance of libraries stands for the decay of a culture. She does not agree with other theoreticians who see annihilation as part of acyclicprocess, where decline may trigger stages of intellectual rebirth and growth as a society recovers from a disaster. The long-term effects of destruction of library collections have repercussions over several generations. Beyond the physical spoliation of· books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and archival records, there is the immaterial and more difficult to assess outcome the curtailment of access to the intellectual content of the lost documents, the inability of scholars and of the public at large to get knowledge out of a public good such as books in a library. One cannot assign a real monetary value to library and archival collections vanished as a result of deliberate vandalism. The extent of material and moral damage caused by acts of aggression against intellectual and cultural objects is not quantifiable.