If George Orwell were still alive, he’d welcome the inclusion of Nineteen Eight-Four and other books going back to 1935 among those pre-2000 books published overseas being removed from the National Library in a process already under way.
Based upon the arguments used to justify the disposal of 625,000 books by the National Library and its supporters, Orwell would know the library is no longer a suitable location for his critique of ‘doublethink’ and ‘Newspeak’.
Orwell criticised the use of “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” to obscure the gap between “one’s real and one’s declared aims”. The discussion of the ‘rehoming’ process on the National Library website and media commentary that claim the removal of non-New Zealand publications is essential to the library’s mission to enhance New Zealand’s national identity makes Orwell’s analysis seem both prescient and trenchant.
Already, the National Library has disposed of 50,000 books, which it dispatched to a book fair.
To justify this cull, the library has taken viewers of TV news on fleeting visits to crowded shelves while a smiling librarian promises digitalisation will make all the books available sometime in the future.
This promise somehow becomes a justification for removing the books before that future arrives. The smiling librarian promises to make information accessible but there’s no acknowledgement of the knowledge contained in the books destined for new ‘homes’ or ‘secure destruction’. We are not told what we have already lost.
According to the policy’s defenders, New Zealanders’ sense of national identity is so fragile it cannot withstand the presence of ‘foreign’ books in the National Library. New Zealanders do not need to read Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi or books about Islam or Scotland. Aristotle is on the unwanted list along with books about apartheid, environmentalism, civil liberties, Omar Khayyam, rugby, cricket, and the Impressionists. Books in more than 50 languages must go.
The National Library’s self-declared mission is to provide books that tell us only what we tell ourselves. Its policy assumes we must choose a national identity based upon insularity to become ourselves. John Donne might weep if he were still alive but he was English so we should not mourn the removal of his poems. The National Library does not want to remind us of his admonition about the need to become “involved in mankind”. It is willing to dispense with books that tell about all the peoples who live here and the others who inhabit or have lived elsewhere.
Ray Bradbury once asked: “Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.” Removing books is a form of induced amnesia and historical euthanasia, according to Bradbury. Contrary to what the National Library has claimed, we cannot build an identity based upon discarding the volumes that discuss our ancestral pasts or our diverse heritages and cultures as we navigate into the future.
As to red herrings, the use of crowded shelves and old computer manuals to illustrate the unwanted books belies the availability of space should there be a will to find it. Contrary to the insinuation these books are ‘depreciated’, they contain value as storehouses of knowledge but also as material objects New Zealanders have read. Some are first editions but all of them document the interests of generations of readers. They constitute tangible evidence of our intellectual formation and evolving sense of our place in the world. These books protect us against emulating a chauvinistic American president as we learn to know ourselves in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Associate Professor Dolores Janiewski teaches topics in the history of the Americas, the Cold War and the 1960s at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. She serves on the Executive Committee of Ngā Kaitiaki o ngā Pukapuka/Book Guardians Aotearoa and has taught history at the University for 31 years.
Read the original article on Newsroom.