John Milton wrote: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”
Book burners have infested the world since mankind invented the written word. Although the Library of Alexandria didn’t burn to the ground, as myth would have it, the words contained in it fell out of favor. Looted, the contents were unavailable to the public. Europe’s dark age saw only select few reading. A priest could read. Royalty as well, but commoners could not. Books and reading books were kept from the common man as a means of control. Knowledge was for a select few.
Nazi were infamous book burners. Tyrants fears books because books contain knowledge. Sometimes uncomfortable knowledge. Librarians pulling books from physical or digital shelves was unheard of just a few years ago. Now it’s common. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer have been pulled from libraries because they contain “that word”.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, even her name are being removed from history because she grew up in the west and wrote of what she knew.
Book burners have canceled some of Dr. Seuss. Facebook and Amazon have canceled actual doctors, with the wrong opinions about, a certain Chinese virus.
This week the American Booksellers Assoc. prostrated itself at the Woke Alter, and digitally burned Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage”. The written statement is absurd. The association called dissemination of her book a: “serious violent incident”. Why? Because a handful of children disguised as adults screamed at them.
I don’t expect book burners to know of John Milton or to have read anything he wrote, or for that matter to have read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Book burners don’t read books – they burn them. Book burners use to torch books. Now they do it with a keystroke.