Chile is in an uproar over the death of dictator Augusto Pinochet, but here’s another story from last week that is very upsetting. An inventory of the books burned at the Universidad de Chile (U Chile) library last week revealed some of the collection’s most precious holdings were among those destroyed. Some texts were more than 120 years old. Masked arsonists entered the U Chile Department of Philosophy and Humanities library on the Juan Gomez Millas campus last Tuesday, stole 1,200 volumes from its collection, and proceeded to use the books to build a bonfire outside the building.
The action was carried out in the name of the Mapuche Liberation Movement, a group whose presence in urban Chile is reportedly growing. Report from the Santiago Times.
Chile Book Burning
My first response and heartfelt belief is that book burning is always wrong. However, I found that this particular report brings home a very sad and frightening realization. Violence seems to work in an initial sense as far as getting the attention of general populations.
Our world, made small by technolgy, is a large inhabited space where people, in a rush to survive and keep unequal shares, are almost deliberately unaware of current events. What these people did was wrong and sets the stage for others with less grievance to continue to burn books. However, if their motivation was to draw attention to their cause, it partially succeeded! How many of us reading this report ever heard of the Mapuches? Is it true that people may be rounded up and charged conveniently with “terrorism”, denied due process of law and imprisoned without the right to face their accussers? If there is, indeed, a right and a need to include indigineous people in our histories how many of us make it a consern until violence erupts? If a Mapuche mother was leafleting at Grand Central Station would the message have come across? These are important questions to consider these days? The entire world is resorting to violence as a means of communication. Is it wrong? Yes it is.
“anti-terrorism” laws are a stack of dynomite to personal freedom. In our country it involves privacy issues and long waits at the airport. In countries like South America, Central America, Africa, Iran and Iraq it can mean a knock on the door in the middle of the night, kidnapping, the grabbing of fathers and children who are never seen again, torture, imprisonment and death. What we ignore hoping to go away often comes back to our own community. It is wrong to not value books. But it is also hard to, when you are hungry and poor.