“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” ―바카라 웹사이트Oscar Wilde
Books are the currency of thoughts and ideas. In a world divided between existential needs and metaphysical conundrums, books are temporal doors to the realms of spirituality, knowledge, fantasy, and freedom. Perhaps that is why tyrants have always hated books. Hated or feared? Perhaps a bit of바카라 웹사이트both.바카라 웹사이트
Soon after the first books started getting printed with the coming of Johannes Gutenburg's revolutionary바카라 웹사이트printing press in Germany, those in power came up with ways to cap the spread of ideas. Sometime in the mid-16th century, the Roman Catholic Church, once one of the most powerful institutions in the West, launched the바카라 웹사이트Index Librorum Prohibitorum바카라 웹사이트or the "List of Prohibited Books".바카라 웹사이트It was a list of publications deemed바카라 웹사이트heretical바카라 웹사이트or contrary to바카라 웹사이트Catholics바카라 웹사이트morality. Reading or owning such books could lead to (and did to) harsh punishments for heresy.바카라 웹사이트
Many works by some of the greatest European thinkers, scientists, philosophers, poets were banned by the Church, and remained hidden for centuries바카라 웹사이트in the papal library of바카라 웹사이트forbidden books.바카라 웹사이트
But tyrants were banning books even before it was conceived. Before the printing press, the written word was a novelty only the rich or religious could afford. Sometime in바카라 웹사이트600 BC, the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah of Anathoth wrote on a scroll that the King of Babylon would destroy the land of Judah. The tail, recounted in Jeremiah 36, ends with the King of바카라 웹사이트Judah burning the scroll and having Jeremiah arrested.바카라 웹사이트
Book burning, the precursor of bans, essentially did the same thing and has been바카라 웹사이트a political exercise across the world.바카라 웹사이트Be it the Catholics or the Communists, the kings or the fascists, the capitalists and the Nazis.바카라 웹사이트Joseph Stalin, an erstwhile bibliophile, was notorious for purging the libraries in USSR of books he found to even have a tinge of바카라 웹사이트liberal Western ideology. As바카라 웹사이트were Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.
When the Mamluks from Turkey invaded India in the 12th century, one of the first things they attacked was Nalanda University, the crown jewel of the Magadha empire (in present day Bihar) which was said to have housed about 9 million books. Book burning was a strategy in the Ottoman empire too in Turkey where conquerors were in the habit of burning books that were written or read in the reign of the previous ruler. It바카라 웹사이트was not a matter of ideology as much as plain politics.
In today's digital바카라 웹사이트world and age of pirated literature and "copies of copies of copies", burning books could best be a바카라 웹사이트symbolic power move. But while the Vatican chose to stop keeping its inventory of banned books in 1966, governments across the world continue to keep tabs. An analysis by PEN America, for instance, has found that nearly school books were banned 2,500 times바카라 웹사이트in 2021 across the US, half of them in states like Florida. The report noted바카라 웹사이트that a majority of바카라 웹사이트books that faced the axe featured content or characters or themes related to LGBTQIA, persons of colour, or other so-called "contentious" themes. A famously "banned" book also led to an attack on writer Salman Rushdie who barely survived the hate.
Banning of books represents a larger malaise,바카라 웹사이트an attack on knowledge, on ideas, on the freedom of the mind to think, create or question. Here, the바카라 웹사이트historical burning of the Library of Alexandria may hold a lesson.
The philosopher-scientist Carl Sagan at the beginning of his magnum opus Cosmos laments the loss of the famous library - a pinnacle of the classical Roman civilisation, stating that “all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls". In an editorial for Time magazine,바카라 웹사이트Richard Ovenden,바카라 웹사이트author of바카라 웹사이트Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, points out that that tale of the burning of the library of Alexandria in what is today's Egypt was a legend - a conglomeration of myths. He purported that rather than resulting from the destruction of war or a single fire, the library (or libraries) of Alexandria went obsolete due to neglect of the state and the intellectual degeneracy of readers who became increasingly drawn to ignorance. The바카라 웹사이트burning of the libraries really represented the corrosion of the great empire built by the Romans from within.
Today, when libraries are fast becoming relics, Alexandria holds an important lesson.바카라 웹사이트Banning books can limit access to knowledge but ignorance is the tyrants' real goal. But the reader must also strive to stay wide awake against the enticing slumber of바카라 웹사이트ignorance. As a mark of this mental resistance,바카라 웹사이트September 18-24 is celebrated as 'Banned Books Week",바카라 웹사이트an바카라 웹사이트annual awareness campaign that seeks to shed light on books that have been banned바카라 웹사이트or challenged by governments or sections of the people across the world.바카라 웹사이트
After all, In the words of Maximillien Robespierre, the hero of the French Revolution,바카라 웹사이트“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
