Ancient World
213 BCE (China): Emperor Qin Shi Huang burns Confucian and philosophical texts to eliminate intellectual opposition.
48 BCE (Egypt): Julius Caesar accidentally burns portions of the Library of Alexandria during a military naval battle.
364 CE (Syria): Emperor Jovian burns the imperial library of Antioch to purge classical pagan texts.Middle Ages and Renaissance
1258 (Iraq): Invading Mongols destroy Baghdad's House of Wisdom, throwing countless Islamic Golden Age texts into the Tigris River.
1497 (Italy): Friar Savonarola stages the "Bonfire of the Vanities" in Florence, burning Renaissance manuscripts and art.
1562 (Mexico): Bishop Diego de Landa burns thousands of sacred Maya codices, leaving only four surviving manuscripts.
Modern Era & The Comic Book Purges
1914 & 1940 (Belgium): German forces deliberately burn the historic Library of Louvain twice across both World Wars.
1933 (Germany): Nazi-led student groups burn 25,000 "un-German" and Jewish-authored books in synchronized university bonfires.
Late 1940s – 1950s (United States): Spurred by moral panic and Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent, schools, churches, and civic groups across America hold mass public bonfires of comic books to save children from "juvenile delinquency." This forced the industry to censor itself via the Comics Code Authority.
1949 (Canada): The Canadian government passes Fulton’s Bill (Section 163 of the Criminal Code), making "crime comics" completely illegal to print, sell, or own. Police raided stores and confiscated or destroyed thousands of comic books across the country.
1981 (Sri Lanka): State-sponsored mobs burn the Jaffna Public Library, destroying 97,000 rare Tamil manuscripts.
1992 (Bosnia): Serbian forces shell the National Library in Sarajevo, destroying 1.5 million volumes.
2015 (Iraq): ISIS militants burn over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts at the Mosul Public Library.
2021 – Present (United States): A modern resurgence of book challenges leads to school districts publicly pulling and restricted graphic novels—most notably Art Spiegelman's Holocaust comic "Maus" and various LGBTQ+ graphic memoirs—with some instances of fringe groups organizing small-scale burnings.
Posted by Worldly-Level9427
5 Comments
cultural genocide. how does this end again?
They want to rewrite history and eliminate the parts they don’t like.
I heard one group is afraid of AI because AI will find out that the group is actually evil.
Ripping out their *spines*.
Just horrifying.
Lol everybody is saying no one wanted those books! Then why scan them? Did they really run out of Internet text?
Are they doing this to rare, one off books?
Or are they doing it to books that have thousands to millions of printed copies?
No, billionaires are destroying books so they can rewrite history slowly but surely with pure bullshit. FTFY.