|
|
|
|
Zero tolerance of printed matter that makes you think
When you are reminded of some of the mass book burnings that have occurred throughout history, it’s enough to make you weep. Burning books, whether in public square bonfires, or the library building in which they are housed, is a ham fisted and brutally crude way of wiping the slate of history clean and pretending that an event never happened, or that an aspect of culture never existed. This brutish method of eliminating a collective memory, as well as the more controlling practices of banning and censorship, are as disabling to a national psyche as an ignorance of history. They leave people in a vacuum, with no past, a confused understanding of the present, and an inability to predict possible future developments.
The book burnings in Nazi Germany were part of a desperate attempt to retrospectively re-create a society and culture that only ever existed in the twisted imaginations of psychopaths, racists, ani-Semites, bigots and white supremacists. The great book-burning stage-managed by Joseph Goebbels in the Orpenplatz in Berlin in 1933 destroyed 80,000 to 90,000 books including works by Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Freud, Erich Maria Remarque, Zola, Proust, Helen Keller and HG Wells. Incredibly, the books were passed from hand to hand along a human chain comprised mainly of university students, encouraged by their professors. By the start of the Second World War, 565 authors and 4,175 titles were banned in Nazi Germany, and yet, the banned titles prevailed and are an intrinsic part of any academic literature programme today.
In very recent history, over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts in the central library of the University of Mosul [many of them UNESCO-registered] were destroyed by ISIS after its invasion of the city in 2014. In 2003 the National Library in Bagdhad was destroyed. Robert Fisk described the awful reality in an Independent[1] article: “But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?” In 1992 the National Library of Sarajevo was demolished by Serb shelling. Among the losses were about 700 manuscripts and incunabula.[2] And yet, no lessons had been learned. Long before these atrocities, the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 BC remains one of the most lamentable occurrences in ancient history. Preston Chesser in The Burning of the Library of Alexandria[3] discusses the possible perpetrators – Julius Caesar, Theophilus the Patriarch of Alexandria and Omar the Moslem Caliph. Chesser believes that probably each of these men “had some hand in destroying some part of the Library's holdings.” But more important than a blame game is “that so much of ancient history, literature and learning was lost forever,” he says.
But in this cyber age, books have made an interesting comeback on the list of concerns for despots everywhere. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Duncan White, entitled The Authoritarian’s Worst Fear? A Book[4] alerts us to the trend of authoritarian governments returning their attention to physical manifestations of the written word. “Having largely corralled the internet,” says White, they “now have declared war on the written word, their oldest enemy.” While the internet is severely censored or just plain unavailable in non-democratic countries, it is more difficult to monitor peoples’ usage of books, magazines and newspapers. There is no audit trail, no record of sharing or commenting, and that is how hardcopy printed matter outperforms the internet when it comes to showing your true feelings and beliefs. You can write all the comments you like in the margins, mark paragraphs, sentences and key words in the loudest yellow and pink highlighters and share as you please without any of your activities being monitored and recorded. You could of course, be caught red handed with the offending book in your possession, but the chances of that are quite remote if you are not on the radar of the authorities.
Some authors like the anonymous North Korean dissident who goes by the pseudonym Bandi have risked their lives in the dangerous game of trying to disseminate their work. Bandi smuggled out his book The Accusation, to portray the lives of ordinary people trying to survive in North Korea, a secretive, volatile, isolated and censored bubble, where information is tightly controlled by the state. Most North Koreans are banned from using the internet as we know it, an academic point when you consider that millions of North Koreans may not even know that the internet exists. The only way for a regular citizen to get online is to use a black-market device near the border. Even foreign embassies are forbidden to have WiFi connectivity, after open WiFi networks were suspected of being used by citizens. Penalties for unauthorized internet use include internment in a Gulag-style camp — not just for the offender but for their whole family. In other authoritarian states like Iran and Saudi Arabia internet access is blocked or restricted for the same reason; to prevent ordinary citizens from reading or hearing any criticism of their ruling regimes. This kind of censorship would not happen in a true democracy because it prevents healthy debate and parliamentary opposition. With the blocking of social media, protests cannot be publicised, and citizens can’t see how democracy functions in other countries. Bandi has successfully resorted to good old-fashioned paper and physical smuggling to outsmart the North Korean authorities.
Just like Stalinist Russia, The People’s Republic of China bans bookshops, books, authors and academics that do not adhere to the Communist Party’s line. This came to light even more clearly, in case we had any doubts, in 2015 when associates of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong mysteriously went missing, until it was discovered they had been detained on the mainland, accused of trafficking in “illegal” books critiquing leading members of the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong make a concerted effort to root out and eliminate any thought, publication or author that were not aligned to Marxist-Leninist principles, and this involved the conflagration of countless books in bonfires across China. In shades of Orpenplatz 1933, the bonfires were event-managed by students who double jobbed as Red Guards. Today, China referees what its citizens search for on Google. In the run up to the vote in China's parliament to abolish presidential term limits and make President Xi Jinping ruler for life, critics on social media attacked the move, but the government blocked some of articles and published pieces praising the party. All Google services from other countries are blocked in China, as is YouTube and the photo-sharing platform, Instagram.
But of course, China is not the only authoritarian regime terrified of printed matter, hardcopy or online. White reminds us: “Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, “literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with LGBT themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate.” Never was it more important then, for us to know our history.
Recently, Turkey’s education minister reported that 301,878 books had been removed from schools and libraries and destroyed because they were supposedly connected to Fethullah Gulen, the cleric blamed for the failed coup attempt against Erdogan’s government in 2016. Since the coup, says White, a report by English PEN[5], the organisation that “campaigns to defend writers and readers in the UK and around the world whose human right to freedom of expression is at risk” found that several periodicals and 30 publishing houses had been shut down and that 80 authors have been prosecuted or criminally investigated. But retrospective compatibility is not just a thing in hipster fashion stores, it’s also proving to be very useful to circumvent detection from the all-seeing information technology systems in non-democracies.
One method is samizdat, which literally translates from the Russian as ‘self-publishing house.’ Samizdat was the underground copying and distribution of banned literature and banned news as a response to censorship in the Soviet Union and other communist countries in eastern Europe. Unsurprisingly, anyone involved in the samizdat movement was subjected to surveillance and harassment by the KGB. Of course, this was in the days of the state agency Glavlit -The Main Directorate for Literary and Publishing Affairs, Glavlit was responsible for the censorship of printed materials in the Soviet Union, the censorship of imported foreign literature and the removal of unpatriotic material from libraries, book shops and museums. From 1930 all printed matter was subjected to a pre-publication censorship, and this was carried to ridiculous lengths. Not only did pre-publication censorship include newspapers and books; incredibly, it included material like advertising posters and theatre tickets. Nothing could be circulated or published without the approval of a Glavlit official and violation of this rule was a serious criminal offense.
Any works that did not toe the party line in the Soviet school of socialist realism, were banned and their authors were hounded and harassed. The poetry of Anna Akhmatova, for example, did not make comfortable reading for the authorities, describing as it did the impact of Stalin’s reign of terror on its hapless victims in poems such as Requiem, which describes her endless queuing outside Leningrad prison where her son was incarcerated as one cruel ploy to silence her poetry. The harshest cut of all for Akhmatova was her expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers, which condemned her to severe hardship by removing her work permit and her food-ration cards and making it almost impossible for her to survive in post-war Leningrad. None of her new work could now be published so she memorised her new poems and passed fragments on to other people to memorise also, before burning them. Another artist who endured much of the siege of Leningrad and chose, like Akhmatova, to remain in Russia, was the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and indeed, his Leningrad Symphony No. 7 was, as described by M.T. Anderson in Symphony for the City of the Dead: “copied onto microfilm, driven across the Middle East, and flown over the deserts of North Africa to be performed in the United States, playing a surprising role in strengthening the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers.” And despite this, Shostakovich lived his life under the shadow of never knowing if or when he displeased Stalin, and what the outcome might be, and like Akhmatova, he did his share of Soviet Realism just to stay alive.
Samizdat became more prolific following the death of Stalin in 1953, and from the 1960s samizdat publications expanded to include critiques of government policies across all aspects of life. But the Soviet government had complete control over the distribution and ownership of printing presses and photocopiers, so samizdat publications were carbon copies of typewritten sheets, which were passed from reader to reader.
Samizdat got an easier ride from the mid-1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. KGB harassment virtually ceased, but the government still retained its monopoly on printing presses and other media outlets. By the late 1980s, the Soviet government had unofficially accepted samizdat, and it all but disappeared by the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of media outlets that were largely independent of government control. But as we can see with Bandi, samizdat is making a comeback, hence the newfound interest in printed matter by authoritarian and right-wing states.
Russia is no longer a totalitarian state, but it is an authoritarian one, says Robert Service in Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin. “Although Putin has nullified many of the liberties enjoyed under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he has stopped a long way short of re-enslavement,” says Service. There is a free press and access to social media and the World Wide Web, and public protest is (in theory) allowed. But this is not, explains Service, because Putin and his colleagues have miraculously become liberals. It suits them, he says, to grant Russian citizens this freedom for a couple of reasons. Firstly, denying freedom of access to information and expression leaves you with an uninformed society who cannot engage as equals on the international stage. Secondly, keeping the channels to information and free expression open ensures that the authorities are always up to speed on the popular mood, and this is useful for anticipating trouble. Since 2014, bloggers with more than 3,000 followers must apply for official registration, and websites promoting street demonstrations have also been banned since 2014. That same year Putin publicly described the internet as a CIA special project. He’s afraid of its influence, so much so that earlier this year the Duma passed the first reading of a bill that would allow ministers to suspend internet access to Russia in the event of an ‘emergency’. You can see the appeal of physical books and papers.
Service discusses some interesting treatments of different media outlets in Russia in recent years. For Putin, it’s all about curbing public criticism, and since most Russians get their news on the television, Putin has ensured that the editors of the national television channels and news websites toe the government line if they want to keep their jobs. This also means hiring staff who will do likewise. Putin has a strangely friendly and robust relationship with Alexei Venediktov, editor of radio station, Ekho Moskvy, who is not afraid to criticise the government. So, what keeps Ekho Moskvy in business and what keeps Alexei Venediktov out of harm’s way? Two-thirds of the station’s shares belong to a state-controlled media company, so funds can be pulled at any time, but Putin allows the station to continue to give the impression that he is quite the tolerant liberal. Venediktov protects himself by employing just enough anti-liberal nationalist commentators, and by using a personal bodyguard.
Putin is more incensed by the output of newspaper, Novaya gazeta, and its staff have paid the price. Over the years, Novaya gazeta has published stories that unsettle Putin, like for example, the apartment-block bomb plots that were used as an excuse for war with Chechnya. The paper continued to publish stories by ex-FSB[6] officer Alexander Litvinenko who accused Putin of illegal activity when he was director of the FSB, after he fled Russia in 2000. Litvinenko was murdered in 2006. In 2003 Yuri Shchekochikhin, deputy editor-in-chief died in mysterious circumstances, probably poisoning, says Service. In 2006 Anna Politkovskaya, who had uncovered torture committed by Russian forces in Chechnya, was killed outside her apartment. The journalist who took over the work of exposing torture in Chechyna, Anastasia Baburova, was shot dead. Nobody knows for sure who orchestrated these killings, but as Service says: “What is certain is that courageous investigative journalism carries a mortal risk when it exposes the wrongdoings of the Kremlin elite and its supporters.”
Religion, yet another organised form of power and control, has been the excuse for many a book burning throughout the centuries. Unfortunately, many of the authors were burned with their books, mainly at the behest of the Inquisition led by the Dominicans, who could have given any dictator a lesson or two when it came to barbaric practices. Great public spectacles that ended with burnings at the stake became familiar sights in 15th and 16th century Western Europe. The crimes of the unfortunate victims included reproducing the Bible in the vernacular, writing a pamphlet that disagreed theologically with accepted norms, or publishing criticisms of the wanton luxury and wealth of the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther was lucky to die a natural death in old age, unlike poor William Tyndale, Savonarola, or Jan Hus. Queen Mary Tudor, or Bloody Mary, dispatched 286 Protestants to the flames during her fanatically Catholic five-year reign of England between 1553 and 1558. These events were recounted famously in Foxes Book of Martyrs. But Protestants were not averse to burning those who disagreed with them either. Michael Servetus was burned by Calvinists with a copy of his book chained to his leg.
While it might seem slightly amusing to the modern reader that Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls was burnt in a churchyard in Limerick after the rosary one evening in the early 1960s, a more serious manifestation of taking offence at a book occurred after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1990. Ayatollah Khomeini put a fatwa on Rushdie and there were riots, book burnings, deaths and injuries, some of the victims being the Italian, Japanese and Turkish translators of the book. Tragically, the Japanese translator Professor Hitoshi Igarashi died. With a reward of $3 million for his murder, Rushdie was forced to go into hiding and become a fugitive. The fallout from Satanic Verses made it more difficult to practice critical free speech, making it a matter of life and death.
And still the practice of burning books continues. In this case, Jennine Capó Crucet, author of a novel and a collection of short stories dealing with surviving as a non-white in mainly white environments, gave a talk on diversity and the college experience at Georgia Southern University. Her novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, follows a Latina student at a prestigious, primarily white university, and her collection of essays, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, examines her own experience as a first-generation American feeling like a stranger in the country where she was born. Crucet’s talk was followed by a hostile question-and-answer session which included a white student questioning whether she “had the authority to discuss issues of race and white privilege on campus”. This escalated into a group of white students burning copies of her book and posting the usual tirades on Twitter.[7] It would seem that fundamentalism and conservatism continue to find homes around the world, the current flavour of alt right gaining particular traction at the moment.
It’s hard to believe that this book burning took place in a democracy and was carried out by students in 2019. Or is it?
[1] Publication Date: Tue, April 15th, 2003. Reproduced on https://www.arabnews.com/node/230733
[2] An early printed book, especially one printed before 1501. See http://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4115
[3] https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/opinion/books-censorship.html
[5][5] https://www.englishpen.org/
[6] Formerly known as the KGB
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/13/students-burn-book-latina-author-jennine-capo-crucet
When you are reminded of some of the mass book burnings that have occurred throughout history, it’s enough to make you weep. Burning books, whether in public square bonfires, or the library building in which they are housed, is a ham fisted and brutally crude way of wiping the slate of history clean and pretending that an event never happened, or that an aspect of culture never existed. This brutish method of eliminating a collective memory, as well as the more controlling practices of banning and censorship, are as disabling to a national psyche as an ignorance of history. They leave people in a vacuum, with no past, a confused understanding of the present, and an inability to predict possible future developments.
The book burnings in Nazi Germany were part of a desperate attempt to retrospectively re-create a society and culture that only ever existed in the twisted imaginations of psychopaths, racists, ani-Semites, bigots and white supremacists. The great book-burning stage-managed by Joseph Goebbels in the Orpenplatz in Berlin in 1933 destroyed 80,000 to 90,000 books including works by Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Freud, Erich Maria Remarque, Zola, Proust, Helen Keller and HG Wells. Incredibly, the books were passed from hand to hand along a human chain comprised mainly of university students, encouraged by their professors. By the start of the Second World War, 565 authors and 4,175 titles were banned in Nazi Germany, and yet, the banned titles prevailed and are an intrinsic part of any academic literature programme today.
In very recent history, over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts in the central library of the University of Mosul [many of them UNESCO-registered] were destroyed by ISIS after its invasion of the city in 2014. In 2003 the National Library in Bagdhad was destroyed. Robert Fisk described the awful reality in an Independent[1] article: “But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?” In 1992 the National Library of Sarajevo was demolished by Serb shelling. Among the losses were about 700 manuscripts and incunabula.[2] And yet, no lessons had been learned. Long before these atrocities, the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 BC remains one of the most lamentable occurrences in ancient history. Preston Chesser in The Burning of the Library of Alexandria[3] discusses the possible perpetrators – Julius Caesar, Theophilus the Patriarch of Alexandria and Omar the Moslem Caliph. Chesser believes that probably each of these men “had some hand in destroying some part of the Library's holdings.” But more important than a blame game is “that so much of ancient history, literature and learning was lost forever,” he says.
But in this cyber age, books have made an interesting comeback on the list of concerns for despots everywhere. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Duncan White, entitled The Authoritarian’s Worst Fear? A Book[4] alerts us to the trend of authoritarian governments returning their attention to physical manifestations of the written word. “Having largely corralled the internet,” says White, they “now have declared war on the written word, their oldest enemy.” While the internet is severely censored or just plain unavailable in non-democratic countries, it is more difficult to monitor peoples’ usage of books, magazines and newspapers. There is no audit trail, no record of sharing or commenting, and that is how hardcopy printed matter outperforms the internet when it comes to showing your true feelings and beliefs. You can write all the comments you like in the margins, mark paragraphs, sentences and key words in the loudest yellow and pink highlighters and share as you please without any of your activities being monitored and recorded. You could of course, be caught red handed with the offending book in your possession, but the chances of that are quite remote if you are not on the radar of the authorities.
Some authors like the anonymous North Korean dissident who goes by the pseudonym Bandi have risked their lives in the dangerous game of trying to disseminate their work. Bandi smuggled out his book The Accusation, to portray the lives of ordinary people trying to survive in North Korea, a secretive, volatile, isolated and censored bubble, where information is tightly controlled by the state. Most North Koreans are banned from using the internet as we know it, an academic point when you consider that millions of North Koreans may not even know that the internet exists. The only way for a regular citizen to get online is to use a black-market device near the border. Even foreign embassies are forbidden to have WiFi connectivity, after open WiFi networks were suspected of being used by citizens. Penalties for unauthorized internet use include internment in a Gulag-style camp — not just for the offender but for their whole family. In other authoritarian states like Iran and Saudi Arabia internet access is blocked or restricted for the same reason; to prevent ordinary citizens from reading or hearing any criticism of their ruling regimes. This kind of censorship would not happen in a true democracy because it prevents healthy debate and parliamentary opposition. With the blocking of social media, protests cannot be publicised, and citizens can’t see how democracy functions in other countries. Bandi has successfully resorted to good old-fashioned paper and physical smuggling to outsmart the North Korean authorities.
Just like Stalinist Russia, The People’s Republic of China bans bookshops, books, authors and academics that do not adhere to the Communist Party’s line. This came to light even more clearly, in case we had any doubts, in 2015 when associates of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong mysteriously went missing, until it was discovered they had been detained on the mainland, accused of trafficking in “illegal” books critiquing leading members of the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong make a concerted effort to root out and eliminate any thought, publication or author that were not aligned to Marxist-Leninist principles, and this involved the conflagration of countless books in bonfires across China. In shades of Orpenplatz 1933, the bonfires were event-managed by students who double jobbed as Red Guards. Today, China referees what its citizens search for on Google. In the run up to the vote in China's parliament to abolish presidential term limits and make President Xi Jinping ruler for life, critics on social media attacked the move, but the government blocked some of articles and published pieces praising the party. All Google services from other countries are blocked in China, as is YouTube and the photo-sharing platform, Instagram.
But of course, China is not the only authoritarian regime terrified of printed matter, hardcopy or online. White reminds us: “Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, “literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with LGBT themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate.” Never was it more important then, for us to know our history.
Recently, Turkey’s education minister reported that 301,878 books had been removed from schools and libraries and destroyed because they were supposedly connected to Fethullah Gulen, the cleric blamed for the failed coup attempt against Erdogan’s government in 2016. Since the coup, says White, a report by English PEN[5], the organisation that “campaigns to defend writers and readers in the UK and around the world whose human right to freedom of expression is at risk” found that several periodicals and 30 publishing houses had been shut down and that 80 authors have been prosecuted or criminally investigated. But retrospective compatibility is not just a thing in hipster fashion stores, it’s also proving to be very useful to circumvent detection from the all-seeing information technology systems in non-democracies.
One method is samizdat, which literally translates from the Russian as ‘self-publishing house.’ Samizdat was the underground copying and distribution of banned literature and banned news as a response to censorship in the Soviet Union and other communist countries in eastern Europe. Unsurprisingly, anyone involved in the samizdat movement was subjected to surveillance and harassment by the KGB. Of course, this was in the days of the state agency Glavlit -The Main Directorate for Literary and Publishing Affairs, Glavlit was responsible for the censorship of printed materials in the Soviet Union, the censorship of imported foreign literature and the removal of unpatriotic material from libraries, book shops and museums. From 1930 all printed matter was subjected to a pre-publication censorship, and this was carried to ridiculous lengths. Not only did pre-publication censorship include newspapers and books; incredibly, it included material like advertising posters and theatre tickets. Nothing could be circulated or published without the approval of a Glavlit official and violation of this rule was a serious criminal offense.
Any works that did not toe the party line in the Soviet school of socialist realism, were banned and their authors were hounded and harassed. The poetry of Anna Akhmatova, for example, did not make comfortable reading for the authorities, describing as it did the impact of Stalin’s reign of terror on its hapless victims in poems such as Requiem, which describes her endless queuing outside Leningrad prison where her son was incarcerated as one cruel ploy to silence her poetry. The harshest cut of all for Akhmatova was her expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers, which condemned her to severe hardship by removing her work permit and her food-ration cards and making it almost impossible for her to survive in post-war Leningrad. None of her new work could now be published so she memorised her new poems and passed fragments on to other people to memorise also, before burning them. Another artist who endured much of the siege of Leningrad and chose, like Akhmatova, to remain in Russia, was the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and indeed, his Leningrad Symphony No. 7 was, as described by M.T. Anderson in Symphony for the City of the Dead: “copied onto microfilm, driven across the Middle East, and flown over the deserts of North Africa to be performed in the United States, playing a surprising role in strengthening the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers.” And despite this, Shostakovich lived his life under the shadow of never knowing if or when he displeased Stalin, and what the outcome might be, and like Akhmatova, he did his share of Soviet Realism just to stay alive.
Samizdat became more prolific following the death of Stalin in 1953, and from the 1960s samizdat publications expanded to include critiques of government policies across all aspects of life. But the Soviet government had complete control over the distribution and ownership of printing presses and photocopiers, so samizdat publications were carbon copies of typewritten sheets, which were passed from reader to reader.
Samizdat got an easier ride from the mid-1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. KGB harassment virtually ceased, but the government still retained its monopoly on printing presses and other media outlets. By the late 1980s, the Soviet government had unofficially accepted samizdat, and it all but disappeared by the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of media outlets that were largely independent of government control. But as we can see with Bandi, samizdat is making a comeback, hence the newfound interest in printed matter by authoritarian and right-wing states.
Russia is no longer a totalitarian state, but it is an authoritarian one, says Robert Service in Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin. “Although Putin has nullified many of the liberties enjoyed under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he has stopped a long way short of re-enslavement,” says Service. There is a free press and access to social media and the World Wide Web, and public protest is (in theory) allowed. But this is not, explains Service, because Putin and his colleagues have miraculously become liberals. It suits them, he says, to grant Russian citizens this freedom for a couple of reasons. Firstly, denying freedom of access to information and expression leaves you with an uninformed society who cannot engage as equals on the international stage. Secondly, keeping the channels to information and free expression open ensures that the authorities are always up to speed on the popular mood, and this is useful for anticipating trouble. Since 2014, bloggers with more than 3,000 followers must apply for official registration, and websites promoting street demonstrations have also been banned since 2014. That same year Putin publicly described the internet as a CIA special project. He’s afraid of its influence, so much so that earlier this year the Duma passed the first reading of a bill that would allow ministers to suspend internet access to Russia in the event of an ‘emergency’. You can see the appeal of physical books and papers.
Service discusses some interesting treatments of different media outlets in Russia in recent years. For Putin, it’s all about curbing public criticism, and since most Russians get their news on the television, Putin has ensured that the editors of the national television channels and news websites toe the government line if they want to keep their jobs. This also means hiring staff who will do likewise. Putin has a strangely friendly and robust relationship with Alexei Venediktov, editor of radio station, Ekho Moskvy, who is not afraid to criticise the government. So, what keeps Ekho Moskvy in business and what keeps Alexei Venediktov out of harm’s way? Two-thirds of the station’s shares belong to a state-controlled media company, so funds can be pulled at any time, but Putin allows the station to continue to give the impression that he is quite the tolerant liberal. Venediktov protects himself by employing just enough anti-liberal nationalist commentators, and by using a personal bodyguard.
Putin is more incensed by the output of newspaper, Novaya gazeta, and its staff have paid the price. Over the years, Novaya gazeta has published stories that unsettle Putin, like for example, the apartment-block bomb plots that were used as an excuse for war with Chechnya. The paper continued to publish stories by ex-FSB[6] officer Alexander Litvinenko who accused Putin of illegal activity when he was director of the FSB, after he fled Russia in 2000. Litvinenko was murdered in 2006. In 2003 Yuri Shchekochikhin, deputy editor-in-chief died in mysterious circumstances, probably poisoning, says Service. In 2006 Anna Politkovskaya, who had uncovered torture committed by Russian forces in Chechnya, was killed outside her apartment. The journalist who took over the work of exposing torture in Chechyna, Anastasia Baburova, was shot dead. Nobody knows for sure who orchestrated these killings, but as Service says: “What is certain is that courageous investigative journalism carries a mortal risk when it exposes the wrongdoings of the Kremlin elite and its supporters.”
Religion, yet another organised form of power and control, has been the excuse for many a book burning throughout the centuries. Unfortunately, many of the authors were burned with their books, mainly at the behest of the Inquisition led by the Dominicans, who could have given any dictator a lesson or two when it came to barbaric practices. Great public spectacles that ended with burnings at the stake became familiar sights in 15th and 16th century Western Europe. The crimes of the unfortunate victims included reproducing the Bible in the vernacular, writing a pamphlet that disagreed theologically with accepted norms, or publishing criticisms of the wanton luxury and wealth of the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther was lucky to die a natural death in old age, unlike poor William Tyndale, Savonarola, or Jan Hus. Queen Mary Tudor, or Bloody Mary, dispatched 286 Protestants to the flames during her fanatically Catholic five-year reign of England between 1553 and 1558. These events were recounted famously in Foxes Book of Martyrs. But Protestants were not averse to burning those who disagreed with them either. Michael Servetus was burned by Calvinists with a copy of his book chained to his leg.
While it might seem slightly amusing to the modern reader that Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls was burnt in a churchyard in Limerick after the rosary one evening in the early 1960s, a more serious manifestation of taking offence at a book occurred after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1990. Ayatollah Khomeini put a fatwa on Rushdie and there were riots, book burnings, deaths and injuries, some of the victims being the Italian, Japanese and Turkish translators of the book. Tragically, the Japanese translator Professor Hitoshi Igarashi died. With a reward of $3 million for his murder, Rushdie was forced to go into hiding and become a fugitive. The fallout from Satanic Verses made it more difficult to practice critical free speech, making it a matter of life and death.
And still the practice of burning books continues. In this case, Jennine Capó Crucet, author of a novel and a collection of short stories dealing with surviving as a non-white in mainly white environments, gave a talk on diversity and the college experience at Georgia Southern University. Her novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, follows a Latina student at a prestigious, primarily white university, and her collection of essays, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, examines her own experience as a first-generation American feeling like a stranger in the country where she was born. Crucet’s talk was followed by a hostile question-and-answer session which included a white student questioning whether she “had the authority to discuss issues of race and white privilege on campus”. This escalated into a group of white students burning copies of her book and posting the usual tirades on Twitter.[7] It would seem that fundamentalism and conservatism continue to find homes around the world, the current flavour of alt right gaining particular traction at the moment.
It’s hard to believe that this book burning took place in a democracy and was carried out by students in 2019. Or is it?
[1] Publication Date: Tue, April 15th, 2003. Reproduced on https://www.arabnews.com/node/230733
[2] An early printed book, especially one printed before 1501. See http://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4115
[3] https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/opinion/books-censorship.html
[5][5] https://www.englishpen.org/
[6] Formerly known as the KGB
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/13/students-burn-book-latina-author-jennine-capo-crucet
