http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/02/06/isis-burns-books-and-people-but-ideas-will-remain/La1LDQkMyS5pRqqjVAFmKJ/story.html
ISIS burns people and books, but ideas will remain
By Jeff Jacoby GLOBE COLUMNIST FEBRUARY 06, 2015
BOOK BURNING is as old as books, and as current as this week’s news.
The Associated Press reported on Monday that Islamic State fanatics have
ravaged the Central Library of Mosul, the largest repository of learning in
that ancient city. Militants smashed the library’s locks and overran its
collections, removing thousands of volumes on philosophy, science, and law,
along with books of poetry and children’s stories. Only Islamic texts were
left behind.
“These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,” one of the
ISIS jihadists announced as the library’s holdings were emptied into sacks
and loaded onto pickup trucks. “So they will be burned.”
There was more book-burning soon afterward, when Islamic State vandals
sacked the library at the University of Mosul. “They made a bonfire out of
hundreds of books on science and culture, destroying them in front of
students,” AP reported. Lost in the libricide were newspapers, maps, and
texts dating back to the Ottoman Empire. UNESCO, the United Nations’
educational and cultural agency, decried the libraries’ torching as “one of
the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human
history.”
Perhaps the most chilling words ever written about book-burning were penned
in 1821 by the great German poet Heinrich Heine: Dort wo man Bücher
verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen — “Where they burn books,
they will in the end also burn people.” Today that axiom is etched on a
plaque in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the public square where more than 20,000
books deemed “un-German” and “decadent” were destroyed in a vast Nazi
bonfire on the night of May 10, 1933.
Though Heine’s words are indelibly associated now with the Holocaust, they
have lost none of their grim prescience. Just one day after news emerged of
the book-burnings in the Islamic State’s so-called “caliphate,” the
jihadists released a ghastly video exulting in the murder of Jordanian pilot
Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who was burned alive in a metal cage.
There is something uniquely diabolical about setting books on fire, a lust
to obliterate that almost ineluctably leads to even more dreadful evils. It
is no coincidence that those obsessed with annihilating the physical
expression of dangerous thoughts or teachings so often move on to
annihilating the people who think or teach them.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it,” orders Captain
Beatty, the book-hating fire chief in “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s
dystopian classic. “Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who
knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
Yet if the long and heartbreaking history of book-burning teaches anything,
it is that books cannot be killed by fire. Pages can be burned, libraries
can be reduced to ash, treatises can be found guilty of heresy or sedition
and set ablaze. But ideas are not so easily extirpated. Heine’s books were
among those the Nazis flung on the bonfires in 1933; so were the books of
more than 2,000 other authors, including Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Karl
Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, and Franz Kafka. Josef Goebbels assured
the enthusiastic crowd that they would “commit to the flames the evil spirit
of the past.” The books, however, are still alive. It was the Third Reich
that went down in flames.
The story of books is the story of books being suppressed — a story of
staggering cruelty, and of equally staggering futility. The destruction of
Mosul’s libraries prompted one Iraqi parliamentarian, Hakim al-Zamili, to
compare ISIS to the Mongols who conquered Baghdad in 1258. Then, too, prized
works of learning — on history, medicine, astronomy — were demolished. “The
only difference is that Mongols threw the books in the Tigris River, while
now [ISIS] is burning them,” al-Zamili said. “Different method, but same
mentality.”
Indeed, in their bloodlust and zealotry, the book-burners of ISIS have many
antecedents — Crusaders, Mongols, Nazis, Wahhabis, Khmer Rouge. But ISIS too
will find that it is easier to slaughter human beings than to destroy ideas.
The Talmud records the death of Chanina ben Teradion, a 2nd-century Jewish
sage killed by the Romans for violating a ban on teaching Torah. It was a
terrible death: He was wrapped in the scroll from which he had been teaching
and set on fire, with wet wool placed on his chest to prolong the agony. His
horrified disciples, forced to witness his death, cried out: “Rabbi, what do
you see?” He replied: “I see parchment burning, but the letters are soaring
free.”
Any brute can burn parchment, or ransack a library, or blow up a mosque, or
bulldoze cultural treasures. But not even mighty armies can destroy the
ideas they embody. The Roman Empire couldn’t keep the letters from soaring
free. ISIS can’t either.