Book burning is a crime against humanity

[Cyrano]

If I were religious, I'd call it a major sin. But, along with physical crimes such as murder, torture, etc., I believe that book burning ranks among the worst crimes that human beings can commit. Book burners are committed to destroying human knowledge, progress and freedom.

Books are an indifferent vehicle that have passed along everything that humans know and have learned from generation, to generation, to generation. Books are a kind of "time machine" that, in their own way, defeat death. Books store and carry all the information, facts and wisdom that have brought about progress and taken our species from mud huts to the moon.

So what is the goal of the book burners? To wipe out history and replace it. To establish an uneducated population. To secure their own power over unlearned people. To become a "God" over all. To destroy individualism and free will.

Let me say this again. Book burning is a crime against humanity. And anyone who wants to burn books must be shunned and exiled to whatever cave they crawled out of.

[Cyrano]

4. Yes. The destruction of that library was one of

the greatest crimes in human history. Think of where we, humanity, might have advanced to by now had that ancient knowledge not been destroyed. And imagine the future of humanity if today's book burners succeed in their goal to destroy all knowledge that human beings have learned and preserved in books.

[sarisataka]

2. Mein Kampf? The Communist Manifesto?

The Statanic Verses? the Twilight series?

Should these be allowed to exist? In public libraries? In school libraries?

[Cyrano]

5. There's always going to be some shit in the fountain of life

And of course they should be allowed in school libraries. How can you define "good," if you can't define "evil?"

[sarisataka]

15. I agree

I have read all of them and while I don't think they need to be mandatory, they should be available at the high-school level.
(Well maybe except for the Twilight series )

[Dr. Strange]

6. Meh, child's play.

What about Abigail Shrier's book?

Professor (!) Grace Lavery: I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.

ACLU (!) Staff Attorney Chase Strangio: Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.

[Cyrano]

13. Can't agree with you

Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," and "Atlas Shrugged," are two "bibles" for today's right wingers. (The ones who actually read books.)

But I wouldn't want them burned. I'd want them read, debated, and finally proved to be books that contain ideologies that aren't consistent with a decent, civilized, caring, humane society.

I'm just guessing here, but people like Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, Lindsay Graham, Rand Paul and others, probably treat Ayn Rand's books as their philosophical touchstones.

Having said that, no book should be burned. They should be be read and evaluated as either an asset, a disease, or a "meh," to human thought. Some people will always treasure "Mein Kampf," and that's their right. But it's not their right to bring the ideas therein into being.

[vapor2]

3. Visions of Fahrenheit 451

[Cyrano]

8. Yep. It's a future that's coming at us with incredible speed

[Throck]

7. With electronic media does it make a difference?

I've donated old research books to the local university library and they've digitized them for eternity. They've taken decaying out of print books and salvaged them.

But if was a Trump documentary would that be a loss?

[Cyrano]

11. "... digitized them for eternity."

There ain't no such thing. Electromagnetically stored info will eventually fade and disappear. Look at movies from the 1930's and 1940's. Many of them have been "remastered," and many that haven't been, are either going or gone.

Depending on the quality of parchment/paper that holds the written word, it can possibly last for centuries. And then, it can be reprinted. Electronically stored data can be saved only if someone is willing to redo it within a reasonable amount of time.

[Captain Zero]

10. Whitman's Leaves of Grass was a banned book...

Can you believe that shit?

My granddaughter starts her senior year next year and for summer reading I'm giving her Leaves of Grass and Slaughterhouse-Five.

I always get her some summer books for her library. She's a really smart kid and in the show choir state champs for Indiana.

[Cyrano]

12. The book burners list is incredible

Those who want to ban classics like Anne Frank's diary, "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Catcher in the Rye," and so many other masterpieces, are people who want to live in a far different world than this one.

Many of them might like to see "Gone With the Wind" on the shelf, alongside the bible.

[SYFROYH]

14. Like buring the flag, book burning can be legit protest and protected.

But that's really different from some book burners who take other people's books and burn them to keep people from reading them.

[Cyrano]

16. There's no law about flag burning

As a matter of fact, that's exactly the approved manner in which you dispose of a worn out flag.

And there's no law against burning a book. Any book.

But burning books in protest is a political statement. And that statement isn't about books. It's about destroying the ideas expressed in those books and warning others that they better stay away from those books because they contain the "wrong" ideology.

Book burners are making a threat. "Read this, and we'll come after you. So you better start thinking 'right.'"

In case you haven't read about those massive Nazi book burning rallies of the 1930's, they weren't "protests." They were death threats. And after the book burners came to power, those "threats" were carried out.

[Best_man23]

17. K&R 10000000%

"Where they burn books, they will too in the end burn people.”

Heinrich Heine

[Dial H For Hero]

18. It's disgusting, but hardly a crime against humanity. It's legal for a reason.

If someone wants to destroy their own private property, they can do so.

[EX500rider]

19. All books? 😁