Fahrenheit 451 was a novel (later made into a movie), by Ray Bradbury, about a society in which books were banned. If books were discovered anywhere, they were seized and burned in mass. The title of the story was supposedly the temperature at which ignited.
Today, a similar story is unfolding but it is not fiction. ISIS is destroying books by the thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands. The most recent episode was their burning of the library in Mosul, Iraq where it has been estimated that ISIS destroyed thousands of volumes including 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. For more info see this linked article.
In Farenheit 451, hope was held out for books surviving at least in memorized form. A group of dissidents, each assigned a single book, would read it over and over again to memorize every word of every line of it. Unlike the story in the novel, where there was hope that books would remain forever in our legacy, people today are not reading and memorizing books in secret to prevent their destruction by ISIS. The truth be told, even if folks in Iraq, and other areas plagued by the animals of ISIS, were trying to memorize each word of every line in every book - it would be of little good since ISIS has made it clear they have absolutely no compunction against burning people to death as easily as they burn books and buildings to destroy them. It is odd, their sheer hatred for the entire population of the earth who are not Islamic along the same exact lines as are they as to how readily they burn works including the Bible; yet, they work themselves into a frenzied psychotic killing madness should even a single page of the Q'ran be burned. I fear the only hope we have of stopping ISIS (and al-Qaeda and the Taliban), and thus literally saving the rest of the world as we know it, is the utter destruction of each and every one who is part of it.
All the best,
Glenn B
Today, a similar story is unfolding but it is not fiction. ISIS is destroying books by the thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands. The most recent episode was their burning of the library in Mosul, Iraq where it has been estimated that ISIS destroyed thousands of volumes including 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. For more info see this linked article.
In Farenheit 451, hope was held out for books surviving at least in memorized form. A group of dissidents, each assigned a single book, would read it over and over again to memorize every word of every line of it. Unlike the story in the novel, where there was hope that books would remain forever in our legacy, people today are not reading and memorizing books in secret to prevent their destruction by ISIS. The truth be told, even if folks in Iraq, and other areas plagued by the animals of ISIS, were trying to memorize each word of every line in every book - it would be of little good since ISIS has made it clear they have absolutely no compunction against burning people to death as easily as they burn books and buildings to destroy them. It is odd, their sheer hatred for the entire population of the earth who are not Islamic along the same exact lines as are they as to how readily they burn works including the Bible; yet, they work themselves into a frenzied psychotic killing madness should even a single page of the Q'ran be burned. I fear the only hope we have of stopping ISIS (and al-Qaeda and the Taliban), and thus literally saving the rest of the world as we know it, is the utter destruction of each and every one who is part of it.
All the best,
Glenn B
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