Burning Books

As I write this there now seems some doubt about whether the so called Burn The Koran day due to take place tomorrow will take place.
There is something grotesquely atavistic about burning books, it is a form of violence, an attack on the life of the mind. Any society in which the burning of books is seen as acceptable erodes its own cultural life and as Heinrich Heine famously remarked, 'where books are burned they will eventually burn people.'
There is however something rather ironic about the outrage amongst Muslim communities throughout the world given recent history, the tendency in many Muslim communities to burn effigies and flags as well as books. Burning an effigy is incidentally of course a demonstration of a desire to burn real people.

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