LIBRICIDE IN RAY BRADBURY’S FAHRENHEIT 451

Abstract

Libricide, genocide and ethnocide
Libricide (the killing of a book) is a sub-phenomenon “occurring within the framework of
genocide and ethnocide” (Knuth 2003: viii) and arises from a combination of turbulent social
environment, authoritarian or totalitarian leadership, and radical ideologies and policies.
Disintegrative conditions on a national scale create an environment in which violence
flourishes. The stressed and disoriented population turns to leaders who promise relief
through a new political and social structure, based on transformational ideas. These ideas,
which may be reactionary or revolutionary, justify, and even glorify, the use of violence to
achieve goals such as national fulfillment or achievement of a utopian world. As regimes
consolidate control, often becoming totalitarian, they tend to cast libraries and books in a
suspicious light, as either seditious, or the tool of the enemy, or a scapegoat for a nation, an
ethnic group or class of people that thwarts their policies. Looting, censorship, neglect, and
violent destruction of books and libraries are therefore sanctioned practices.