Libraries and archives are museums of human knowledge. If civilization falls or regresses severely, the destruction of libraries will be a part of the decline. If you want to destroy a society, aim at its libraries. Putin knows this. This is why his military has deliberately targeted libraries in Ukraine. As Richard Ovenden wrote in “Putin’s War on Ukrainian Memory” in the Atlantic, “The destruction of knowledge and erasure of memory has always been a war aim for those who seek to impose their own version of history on the next generation.”
Blowing up libraries with bombs and missiles is just one of Russia’s crimes against knowledge. They are also deliberately trying to erase Ukrainian historical and national memory.
To [Oksana Bruy, the president of the Ukrainian Library Association], this is a systematic attack on the very idea of Ukraine. “The Russians are destroying Ukrainian historical literature and fiction,” she said. In the district of Kupyansk, in Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian occupying forces ordered all school-library books published after 1991 to be registered and destroyed, even children’s books and fairy tales. They were replaced with officially sanctioned materials brought in from the Russian Federation.
On one hand, this feels futile because books are less necessary in an electronic world. But not all old paper items (books, archives, etc.) have been digitized. And regarding physical libraries, there is a prestige in books. Destroying a book feels worse than deleting an electronic file (even though knowledge is lost in either case).
Here in the U.S., we have fascist politicians working to denude libraries of the things they would like us to forget. These fascists (i.e., the current Republican party) want to erase gay and non-white people from our consciousness. By destroying availability of literature and history texts that mention the out-groups that they hate, they believe children will grow up hating the same people they do.
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