Book bans and burning

People tend to think of strict security checks as having started after the bombing of New York’s Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, but in the Philippines, university students had a taste of such checks 30 years earlier.

I’m referring to the declaration of martial law and security guards being posted to check on people’s bags before entering a building, with particular attention given to students.

Being a college student at that time, I knew from the friendly guards that they never really confiscated books, more because they would not have been able to tell anyway if they were subversive.

But the search for subversive materials created an atmosphere of fear, even paranoia. While the martial law regime eventually eased up their monitoring of so-called subversive publications in rural areas and in urban poor communities, it was still dangerous if you carried them around. Reports would appear every now and then in newspapers about a raid, or an encounter with armed rebels, with claims of having seized firearms and “voluminous subversive materials.”

The martial law regime was only following a centuries-old pattern of authoritarian rulers attempting thought control. In 213 BC, the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of history and philosophy texts, and the execution of at least 460 scholars. He then ordered the writing of his own desired version of the destroyed books. The despot died three years after the book burning and his empire collapsed three years after his death.

The Catholic Church also had its notorious Index of Forbidden Texts, first published in 1557 with a final edition in 1948 (listing 4,000 books), although the list remained in use until 1966. The target? Immoral and blasphemous materials, read, anything that might endanger one’s “faith.”

In recent history, we have the notorious book burning of May 1933 when the Nazis launched a campaign against “un-German” books. In one event alone in Berlin, 20,000 books were burned. The worst was yet to come with Nazis imprisoning and executing academics and intellectuals. Yet, Hitler’s own “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), expounding his extremist views, was printed in the United States in 1939, to be read by academics and the US military to figure out the madman’s mind.

It’s striking that even during martial law, libraries, at least that of UP Diliman, never withdrew so-called subversive publications. Today, without martial law, we have the withdrawal from several state universities the publications from the National Democratic Front, several of which were printed as part of the peace talks and distributed even to government agencies. A Commission on Higher Education regional office memo cites advice from the Regional Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict to withdraw “literatures, references, publications, resources, and items that contain pervasive ideologies of the Communist Terrorist Groups.”

Censorship and book banning is repulsive for three reasons. First, it demeans students, seeing them as unthinking and gullible.

Second, book banning is a tool of terrorism, intimidating people to believe that carrying, or reading a particular book could bring trouble. Later it could well become any book. Watch “Fahrenheit 451” on HBO based on Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel, set in the future, where firefighters go around burning any kind of book. At one point, this chilling observation: “‘Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.’”

Finally, we should learn from history, where despots destroyed publications and tried to replace them with their own versions of history. We might forget Marcos, too, ordered the production of books on Philippine history and political philosophy. It is not accidental that the current book banning happens at a time of historical revisionism and attempts to whitewash the martial law regime.

Universities are supposed to teach students to think, not just to be critical but to discern, to weigh carefully what’s written. That is where libraries must be considered practically sacred in giving access to divergent views. Anti-Marcos activists have never called for the withdrawal from libraries of his books (ghost-written, actually, by UP professors but that’s another story). Not that anyone reads them except academics like myself, yes we read them all, Marx to Marcos.

George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” has this thought-provoking passage that helps us understand what all this book banning is about: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

mtan@inquirer.com.ph