Book Burning

By Mark Krikorian on February 12, 2010

Linda Chavez and I have had our disagreements, so take this for what it's worth, but a paragraph in her column today was deeply disturbing, all the more so for its casualness. In listing lessons she learned from weathering the snow storms, she wrote:

Third lesson: Don't give away old books; they burn better than artificial logs. I was glad I had a few left-wing tomes to throw in the fireplace, along with my collection of reports from the Center for Immigration Studies. I'm not sure which threw off more hot air, but they kept us warm for a few hours.


I don't even care about the snarky comment about CIS's work; it's sophomoric, but such is life. But the very idea of burning books fills me with disgust -- I wouldn't burn "Mein Kampf" or "Das Kapital," for heaven's sake, let alone Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country" or the tendentious, open-borders dreck from the Center for American Progress. Sure, some stuff you eventually have to throw away or recycle, but book-burning just gives me the creeps. Maybe this was an attempt at humor, but if so, it failed.