Amanda Marcotte writes about books as speech for Good: “To some, such intense interest in a library seems overblown. The library is a small fraction of the movement, and it may seem callous to worry so much about replaceable items when live people are being arrested and roughed up by the police. But the truth is that books matter. “No book ever pushed a cop,” says writer and journalist Jeff Sharlet, who started a group called Occupy Writers to support the movement. “Books are speech. Bloomberg has, in effect, stumbled his way into a war on books. So far in history, nobody’s ever won that war for good.”
The People's Library, Being Rebuilt Yesterday in Liberty Plaza
Nicolaus Mills writes for the Guardian about the 1932 police destruction of the Bonus Army encampment: “In 1932, a police and Army raid on the Bonus Army of first world war veterans, who had come to Washington, DC to ask for immediate payment of their Adjusted Service Certificates (whic everyone called their bonus), resulted in an Occupy Wall Street-like rout. But in the end, the vets were the ones who prevailed and gained public sympathy.”
boingboing covers our article on Bloomberg’s library hypocrisy with the headline “One week after attending NY Public Library gala, Bloomberg destroys #OWS library containing honorees’ books (and his own)”
Laurie Penny writes for the New Statesman about why Bloomberg has ordered the NYPD to kidnap books:
“When the news of the vandalism of the Occupy Wall Street library came through, Twitter was alight with outrage. Even the most dribblingly obnoxious right-wing troll finds it hard to argue when people tell him trashing books is bad karma. Such was the uproar that the Mayor’s office tweeted a photo of what appeared to be part of the OWS library, stacked in a sanitation department garage, ready for protesters to pick up on Wednesday, if they were polite about it.
The image looks like nothing other than a hostage photo, which is exactly what it is: here is your library, more or less intact. We will give it back if you hand over your collective future without argument. Just leave it in the trashcan on the corner of Wall Street.
It occurs to me that the impounding of books is a subtler and more appropriate metaphor for how culture is policed in modern times than the burning or destruction of books. Across the developed world, as austerity programmes kick in to finance the cataclysmic self-indulgence of the super-rich, it is libraries, schools and universities that are being priced out of the reach of ordinary people.”
Occupy Wall Street Library 