By TruePublica: The
burning of books represents little more than an element
of censorship and usually emanates from a cultural, religious, or
political opposition to the materials in question.
Wikipedia lists
classical examples such as: China’s Qin Dynasty (213–210 BCE), the
burning of the Library of Alexandria (c. 49), the obliteration of
the Library of Baghdad (1258), the destruction of Aztec
codices by Itzcoatl (1430s), and the burning of Maya codices on the
order of bishop Diego de Landa (1562).
There are of course more recent examples. In Azerbaijan, when a
modified Latin alphabet was adopted, books published in Arabic script
were burned, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s. In the 1930s and
40s the Nazi government decreed broad grounds for burning material: “which
acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German
thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people.”
