What is Book Burning? Part #2: Persuasion

Far removed from the threshold crossing of paper to atrophic ash, book burning admits a fear of current ideas and the resurgence of old ideas believed already burned.

What is Book Burning? Part #2: Persuasion; Writer: Christopher Handrahan; Oct. 6, 2022, MST (Published on Stitched Ink Media)

Far removed from the threshold crossing of paper to atrophic ash, book burning admits a fear of current ideas and the resurgence of old ideas believed already burned. It is the shaming of a freedom of thought allegedly not correctly thought out.

It is the enabled passion to isolate freedoms against the persuasion of other, unmovable freedoms of choice deemed unacceptable.

Book Burning is the political and extended social privilege of “us” as an elitist status over the rights of ideas belonging to “them,” and the calculating manipulation of systemic goodwill as a rightful privilege for the same, excessive political advantage. It is a lack of skill otherwise, and a lifelong, closed imagination unfettered by unnecessary books, words and ideas not of a like-mindedness and proper, exclusive kind persuaded to be otherwise.

Book burning is the assumed end of thought, imagination and innovation, and the abuse of political and social fairness.

It assumes the ending of evolutionary thought and social change fought against the stringencies of justness. It aims to put an end to it. “Now!”

As hidden censorship, common forms of book burning include taxations, political subsidies, restrictions to distribution, threat and intimidation, torture and death. Sometimes, it assumes the actual burning of paper with a blameless justification enabled by self-persuasion owing to the chosen lack of an empathetic “other” worthy of consideration.

As an exemplar of political spin, it can be a dangerous precedent and contrary to the democratic compromise of freedoms to permit the subsidy of media without proper, protective checks on the system offering the subsidy: against its easy willingness for control and the ambitious ease of ready-made boundary-crossings prevalent to the political arena and its opportunistic rallying cries.

As political persuasion heartfeltly contrary to a social interest in fair exchange of thought, book burning is the line-crossing opportunism for capital and a like-mindedness of approval schemed for a political sidedness to prevail as the means to an end for monetary, self-permitting benefit.

The ambitious squashing of ideas for the ever-striving control of systems, beliefs, ideas and thoughts. For what? The political vote! And the countless proffered capital advantages of controlled traditions priorly advantaged to the system as a yet unsolvable conundrum of history.

The control of one over the other as a sensitive spite marking the sidedness of a political spectrum, the obviousness of any legitimate historical account of book burning should reveal a clear, steady preference to persuade by one extreme over all others as a simple commonness of shared experience to claim.

It is antagonistic to the evolutionary nature of time, history, and the re-fought freedoms of choice.

It is self-serving pride in the chilling ride of a freedom to singly proclaim differently over the will of a massive commonality demanding otherwise.

Here is touched the basis and roots of freedom. The willful restraint of freedoms to explore ideas, beliefs and thoughts to attainment: for the democratic vote, the historically proclaimed test of freedoms!

Due to the unchecked prides of the book burners, the balancing of freedoms requires either an entire removal of censorship over books or the equality of internment and exile of books across the whole political and social spectrum, as resistance to a cause rooted in an abuse of systems, with the book burners being the first to persuasively proclaim a choice made justly for the suppression of other choices.

Book burning, as simply one of many political “tools in the toolbox,” reinitiates this choice of resistive action into reality as a valve restrictively withholding the pressures of normal, social and evolutionary challenges common to the history of its species; and with a preferred privilege of denial to its timely trials forcing persuasive change to occur as evolutionary advantage to its social attentions.

A Recommended Book for this post:

- Liquidation, Imre Kertesz

Blog Essay: What is Book Burning? Part 2; Written by Chris Handrahan