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Most people would struggle to find kids' classics
Little House On The Prairie and
Dr Seuss offensive. But a UK university is failing to learn the lessons of the past
by insisting they carry warnings for 'harmful content'.
Book banning and book burning - the attempted annihilation of a culture by attacking the written word - is nothing new.
Just ask the
Qin Emperor of China a couple of thousand years-or-so ago - he of the
Terracotta Army.
He liked to roast a book or two. As did the Romans a few hundred years later, and the Spanish invaders of the Americas in the 16th century. They had a blast burning books.
Take, for example, the impact they had on the indigenous Mayan people, who lived on the land that is now Central America for
thousands of years.
They had hundreds of beautiful, hand-scribed books made from bark. They were experts on the movements of the stars and wrote what they'd learnt down in those tomes. They had a cool system for counting days, and such like. They were pretty damn good at it, too.
Then along came the Conquistadors, who'd crossed the Atlantic from Spain. They - or to be precise, their priests - didn't much like the Mayans having their own thoughts on anything, and they certainly didn't approve of their religion. It was Catholicism or bust for these godly folk.
So, they burnt their books. Guess how many are left now?
Three. They're called
the Mayan Codices, and the fact these books survived - by accident, as the priests missed a few - is the only reason we know exactly how much they'd learnt about the sky above them. Imagine our culture if it was reduced to just three books?
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