Book-Burning: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|''"That was but a prelude; where they have burned books, they will ultimately also burn people."''|'''Heinrich Heine''', from the 1823 tragic play ''Almansor''.}}

 

 

How do you show that your [[Police State|totalitarian regime]] is [[Kick the Dog|monstrous]] and trying to [[The Evils of Free Will|stamp out all free thought]]? Or that your [[Moral Guardians]] have crossed the line into [[Culture Police]]? Have 'em hold a good old-fashioned book burning!

 

 

[[Captain Obvious|Writers usually have pretty strong feelings on this subject.]] (Bookstores often have ''different,'' somewhat conflicted, feelings. If someone's buying armloads of books from your store, their intent to burn may not concern you much.)

 

 

Compare [[Break-Up Bonfire]], which carries a more personal meaning.

 

 

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

** In [[The Fundamentalist|true Chick fashion]], this is one of the few examples where the burning is presented as a ''good'' thing.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* ''[[Equilibrium]]'''s dystopian society does this to pretty much any piece of art or literature considered inductive of emotion. They also like to [[Kick the Dog|kill dogs]] for much the same reason.

* Reverend Shaw Moore in ''[[Footloose]]'' has a [[My God, What Have I Done?]] moment when he sees people took his words to the extreme of burning books.

== [[Literature]] ==

* [[Ray Bradbury]]'s ''[[Fahrenheit 451]]'' is one of the iconic examples of this, set in a world where nearly all literature has been banned and burned.

* At the conclusion of the novel "[[Auto Da Fe]]" by Nobel-Prize winner [[Elias Canetti]], the bibliophile protagonist immolates himself on a pile of his own library.

* The Japanese novel ''[[Toshokan Sensou]]'' is about the conflict between two military organizations after the Japanese government passed a law that allows the censorship of any media deemed to be potentially harmful to Japanese society, including book burning.

* The short story "Earth's Holocaust" from [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]]'s ''Mosses from an Old Manse'' is about a society that burns everything that it finds offensive, including its literature.

* The page quote above comes from ''Almansor'', a tragic play written in 1823 by Jewish playwright Heinrich Heine, in reference to the burning of copies of the Islamic holy book, the Qur'an, by the "Catholic monarchs," Ferdinand and Isabella, following the conquest of the Muslim country of Grenada, the final stage of the Reconquista of Spain. And indeed, the words proved prophetic as [[The Spanish Inquisition]] (started by those same monarchs around 1480, twelve years before the conquest) was going down at about this time, which had many people being [[Burn the Witch|burned at the stake]] for heresy, and would lead to serious persecution of Jews and Muslims.

* In the ''[[Elemental Logic]]'' quartet, the Library at Kisha was burned early on in the Sainnite invasion, which is considered a great tragedy. The loss of many books and the country's main center of higher education actually led to the Shaftali losing a significant part of their writing system- the meanings of many of their glyphs (ideographs, used along with an alphabet system or separately as part of a system of telling the future) were forgotten in a short period of time because they were slightly esoteric knowledge to begin with, and no lexicon listing the meanings of all the glyphs survived the burning. A large part of the plot of the third book deals with {{spoiler|a time-displaced character stealing a lexicon and hiding it so that the "missing" glyphs can be rediscovered in her present.}}

 

* This is what's about to happen in combination with the witch-burning in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' "Gingerbread", when a demon deludes the town's adults into a witch hunt and Buffy and Willow nearly get burned.

* Blanche relates a story about this in ''[[The Golden Girls]]'', and it sounds like she's going to say her father stopped the burning, but all he did was say they should start the fire from the bottom.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''[[Postal]] 2'' has a level in which the player has to fight their way through throngs of anti-book protesters, who burn down the town library with him in it.

* In ''[[Dragon Age]]'', one of Wynne's gifts, ''The Search for the True Prophet'', is mentioned as looking as if it had been rescued from a fire at some point. It is interesting to note that the book in question is actually an [[Alternative Character Interpretation|alternative view]] of [[Crystal Dragon Jesus|Andraste]] which was probably quite heretical and blasphemous.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

** Heh... [[A Worldwide Punomenon|burning a Kindle]].

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* In ''[[South Park]]: [[The Movie|Bigger, Longer and Uncut]]'', the kids' parents hold a massive bonfire of Canadian media.

 

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Censorship Tropes]]

[[Category:This Index Is On Fire]]