The destruction of knowledge, whether by algorithm, occupation, or bureaucracy is an act of power and a prelude to fascism, writes Zeenat Adam.
In 1258 CE, when Hulagu Khan and his Mongol hordes laid siege to Baghdad, Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), where for centuries scholars translated Aristotle, advanced disciplines of astronomy, medicine, philosophy and mathematics, was destroyed. The Tigris River ran black for days with the ink of the books – an extinction of a civilisation’s claim to intellectual sovereignty. Historically, those who destroy sources of knowledge, seek not only to control the minds to rule over people, but often, follow with the annihilation of people who oppose them.
The modern wave of knowledge destruction should terrify us. Occupation, state control, and political domination require amnesia of a nation.
Artificial intelligence
The AI industry’s hunger for “pre-LLM: text is particularly insidious. Recent court filings in San Francisco revealed that Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, ran an internal program called “Project Panama” – an effort, in the company’s own words, to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” Millions of print books were bought, their spines sliced off by hydraulic cutters, their pages fed through industrial scanners, and the paper discarded. A federal judge ruled it legal.
The preference for books published before 2022 are targeted because they are “structurally guaranteed” to be free of AI-generated contamination. The logic is that the machines need pure human output to learn from, then proceed to destroy the original – a form of auto-cannibalism. Retain the book, and there are two copies; shred it and there is only one digital source that could be subject to manipulation and erasure. Booksellers in Europe report anonymous bulk orders for rare and out-of-print titles, brokered by services that keep buyers’ identities hidden. While the books may not be burning in a public square, the shredders are hidden behind non-disclosure agreements or euphemisms like “destructive digitisation” to manage the optics.
Censorship and national security
Kashmir is the overtly political face of the same phenomenon. When books like “Kashmir: The Case for Freedom” or “Azadi,” are marked as contraband in the name of national security, it is a deliberate method of occupation and securitisation. The Jammu and Kashmir administration, appointed directly by New Delhi, answerable to no local electorate, ordered a full audit of every library and educational institution in the territory, hunting for “objectionable material.” Police conducted raids, seizing books “glorifying terrorism” or undermining the sovereignty of the Indian state. Twenty-five books were declared “forfeited” for the crime of contested history. Before that, police seized 668 titles by a single Islamic scholar from Srinagar’s shops. A Kashmiri anthropologist has a word for what is happening: memoricide – the killing of a people’s memory of themselves; a deliberate campaign to make it impossible for Kashmiris to encounter their own history except in the version their occupiers approve.
While New Zealand’s National Library cull of half-million-books appears reasonable under the guise of administrative rationale; no demand, no room, no budget, it mirrors the “comprehensive audit” of Srinagar. The Quran, Bible, Torah, and classics such as Shakespeare and Dickens have succumbed to the curatorial power: the authority to determine what is retained and preserved, and what may deserve the landfill. When a bookseller offered $160,000 to save the surplus books from the shredder, the offer was declined and the books were fated to rotting.
In an age of information abundance, and with access to the internet, which we were promised would be the new Library of Alexandria, though more advanced, digitised, fireproof, and decentralised, we must question the pulping of books. The burning of the Library of Alexandria as a slow-motion catastrophe, by Caesar’s fire, Aurelian’s siege, mob violence of 391 AD, or the bureaucratic strangulation of late antiquity – did not just destroy scrolls. Each act was political. Each reduced the Mediterranean world to what its conquerors wanted to be retained in memory. In an age where algorithms now determine what we see and what is buried, we must consider how the purge of books is censorship and control.
In 1499, Cardinal Cisneros ordered the burning in public squares of the most advanced repository of knowledge; tens of thousands of Arabic manuscripts in Granada, Cordoba and Toledo; the accumulated scholarship of eight centuries of Andalusian Muslim civilisation, were turned to bonfires as the Reconquista perpetrated its xenophobic purge. The books went first. The expulsions and forced conversations followed. Knowledge destruction was not incidental to those campaigns – it was their opening move, because a people who cannot read their own history cannot argue with the story being told about them.
The fascism of the twenty-first century is hidden behind “dataset” or “optimisation.” Control the archive and you control the argument. The 1933 Nazi book burnings of anything “un-German” preceded the human crematoriums. The Tigris River ran red with blood of humans after it ran black from the destruction of Bayt al-Hikma. The bonfires in Granada were followed by the inquisition. When New Delhi decides Kashmiris cannot read Arundhati Roy, when Wellington decides half a million books are worth less than the cost of storing them, when Silicon Valley decides the physical form of a book is disposable once its contents have been ingested, each version of scholasticide is not just an erasure of education and epistemology, but an erasure of history. This is preparation for a world of heightened control through the destruction of knowledge.
Zeenat Adam is a former diplomat and an independent international relations strategist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
