The New Yorker takes a look at what looks to be a growing trend, burning books.
From the piece...
When we think of book-burners, we mostly think of backward, reactionaries blocking against dissent, free thought, radical art, or progressive political reform. We think of official religions censoring the unorthodox, and of totalitarian states issuing edicts against anything threatens centralized control. Or we think of the powerful inciting the masses into fits of destruction. In history, we indeed think of the Inquisition and of the Third Reich. And in novels, the image of top-down state-sponsored madness comes most notably from Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”
Yet, recently, small groups who reflect extreme minority opinions across the political spectrum have turned to burning books. It has become as much an act of provocation and one of censorship. This spring, Terry Jones, the radical pastor of the Christian Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, put the Koran “on trial,” and then after condemning it, a copy of the document was burned, which caused violent reprisals in Afghanistan and elsewhere. (Months earlier, Jones had backed away from plans to burn the Koran after he was roundly condemned by American officials and by people throughout the world. By March, perhaps tired of being out of the headlines, he changed his mind.) And now, in Amsterdam, another small, passionate political group is using book-burning as a way of getting attention. The political motivations and desired ends are much different, but the means are precisely the same: spectacle, provocation, brutish and simple acts in response to complex issues.
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