In defense of civilization …

… Neal Ascherson — Warrior Librarians: Cultural Pillaging —  LRB 2 July 2020. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Archibald MacLeish, a well-known poet appointed Librarian of Congress by Roosevelt in 1939, was at the centre of these expeditions. He warned that time to save European culture was running out, ‘not like the sand in a glass, but like the blood of an opened artery’. The ‘common culture of the West’ was being destroyed by book-burning and the exile of European intellectuals. Librarians could no longer be merely custodians. War was being waged against ‘the records of the human spirit ... the keeping of these records is itself a kind of warfare. The keepers, whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.’

Many today, I suppose, would not have bothered.