Burn It!
“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury did not live long enough to see that the ritual that inspired him to pen Fahrenheit 451 is being taken up by the so-called progressive Left which has traditionally been a stalwart defender of freedom of thought and speech. On September 16, 2020, Newsweek ran an article titled “J.K. Rowling Book Burning Videos Are Spreading Like Wildfire Across TikTok.” This time it was not evangelical pastors or far right Trump supporters who were burning Rowling’s books, but former Harry Potter fans protesting the author’s alleged transphobia. The article referred to a video posted on the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok by @elmcdo which featured a number of Harry Potter books placed on a burning pyre. “You have to stop using ‘death of the author’ as an excuse to have your cake and eat it too,” the voice-over said according to the article. “While the reader’s perspective is an important part of interpretation and meaning, it is impossible to completely divorce a work from its creator.” The voice-over continued: “The positive impact J.K. Rowling’s work had on millions of readers does not negate how her hateful lobbying has affected the trans community.” The video ended with the following message: “Your love of ‘Harry Potter’ is not more important than the lives of trans women.”
The article also reported that a number of videos showing Harry Potter books being destroyed were circulating on the platform, though at the time of writing, none of these videos were available, and @elmcdo’s account followed by 17.4K people was private. A similar discussion was circulating on Twitter at around the same time, triggered by a tweet posted by the Irish pop duo Jedward. “Does anyone need firewood this winter!,” the tweet read. “JK’s new book is perfect to burn next to a Romantic fire. Aww get all cozy and comfy can’t wait.” The new book Jedward was referring to was Troubled Blood, the fifth of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective series written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. An early review by Jake Kerridge published in The Telegraph talked about a plotline involving “a transvestite serial killer” which, Kerridge claimed, reflected Rowling’s “stance on trans issues”: “never trust a man in a dress.” It was later revealed by The Guardian that this character was “just one of many suspects”; he was neither the main villain, nor was he portrayed as trans or even called a “transvestite.”
But how could book burning, a ritual notoriously associated with the Nazis in contemporary times, and widely regarded as a hallmark of censorship and totalitarianism, be appropriated by progressive activists in the name of solidarity with one of the most marginalized groups in society? According to Ella Kipling writing for the Irish football, movies and gaming website HITC, it wasn’t. Disputing Newsweek’s reporting, Kipling wrote that if we search “JK Rowling book burning” on TikTok, we will find only one video of a book being burned, and the video had only 49 likes as of September 18, 2020. While book burning was a “hot topic” on Twitter, she continued, very few people are actually practicing it, and Jedward themselves referred to their tweet as a “joke.”
Kipling seems to have a very magnanimous view of the symbolism of book burning, at least of the woke Left kind. It is unrealistic to expect droves of people to post videos of themselves burning J. K. Rowling books publicly, and still more so if they are self-described progressive activists (not to mention the many legal problems this might cause for both the user and the social media platform in question). In any case, does this really matter? Shouldn’t we be worried about the fact that book burning is considered as a legitimate way of protesting by so many on the Left? Do we need to actually watch people shouting #RIPJKRowling – a viral hashtag at the time – in unison, and dancing around a pyre of burning Harry Potter or Cormoran Strike books to notice and be concerned about the unsettling similarity? What should we think of the fact that Jedward’s tasteless “joke” had been retweeted 6,004 times and had 51.4K likes by March 12, 2022? Or that a simple Twitter search yields thousands of tweets calling for the burning of Rowling’s books?
The woke Left tends to dismiss these reactions as the grumbles of a few frustrated readers or as typical social media drivel with little, if any, real-life consequences (conveniently forgetting that according to their own understanding of harm, it isonly those who have been subject to an offense, in this case Rowling, who can decide what its consequences are). But it is not just tweets. The idea of rewriting the Harry Potter series by someone other than Rowling herself is a recurrent theme of woke Rowling-bashing in more serious publications as well. Hence Aja Romano, a culture staff writer for the left-leaning American news and opinion website Vox, muses that a new Harry Potter TV series could allow Warner Bros. to reject Rowling’s “intolerance” with a different story that embraces inclusivity and diversity. It could have:
a trans main character who receives their Hogwarts letter after they discover they can shape-shift into their true form. Desi Harry, Black Hermione, Remus/Sirius or Albus/Scorpius in a queer life partnership, queer and genderqueer wizards running amok. Asian characters whose identities aren’t fetishized, Jewish characters whose identities aren’t trivialized, non-demonized fat characters, non-nuclear, non-heteronormative families everywhere!
Romano, writing in a magazine which has an average of 23 million visitors per month, is not a lone-wolf social media user venting their frustrations (they define themselves as non-binary – hence the grammatical quirks), or boycotting a powerful figure whom they believe is promoting ideas that they find offensive. They are not talking from a position of powerlessness; quite the contrary, they are among the many who have the power to set the terms of the debate on these issues, and determine what is culturally acceptable and what is unacceptable, a key element of cancel culture. True, Romano who, in their own words, has “spent years critiquing the many problems embedded in J.K. Rowling’s stories,” do not go so far as to issue a call for a ban on or the burning of Rowling’s books. But they talk about the need for separating the art from the artist, and erasing her name, even though it may be difficult to do so “when the artist is right there, reminding you that she intended for her art to reflect her prejudice all along.” For Romano and scores of like-minded woke activists, it is not the books that pose a threat but the author herself, her mere existence which is “presumed to” threaten the existence of others. So they imagine a Harry Potter without Rowling. “Harry Potter is ours now,” they write; “J.K. Rowling lost custody over her kids and now we can spoil them, let them get tattoos, express themselves however they want, love whomever they want, transition if they want, practice as much radical empathy and anarchy as they want.”
Note the language and the tone here. First, Romano effortlessly slip from impact to intentions, and tell us, authoritatively, that Rowling aims for “her art to reflect her prejudice.” But how do they know her true intentions? Rowling’s widely vilified tweet of December 19, 2019 – the initial spark that ignited the wildfires of accusation and abuse – simply expresses her support for Maya Forstater, a consultant who lost her job at the Center for Global Development for holding gender-critical beliefs: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?” Second, how could a writer (or, for that matter, a reader) decide that another writer should lose custody of her work? Let’s be more direct: how dare they? This is not a question about Rowling’s views on transgender rights; she may or may not be transphobic (Rowling herself vehemently denies these allegations, and many in the LGBTQ+ community believe she isn’t; for what it’s worth, I agree with the latter). That might prompt her readers not to buy her books or call for a boycott. But erase her authorship? Strike through her name?
And how different is this from the paranoid mindset that has motivated much of book burning by totalitarian regimes? After all, the circular containing the fire oaths to be read during the 1933 book burnings included the name of individual authors, not the books, considered to be polluting the spirit of the German youth. Who is polluting the youth today? And who decides whose books to burn? Let me reiterate. None of the mainstream publications mentioned here urge readers to actually burn Rowling’s books. Yet, not unlike evangelical pastors or far right Trump supporters, they present her ideas as an existential threat to true believers, one that needs to be symbolically smoldered so that the phoenix of a new, genderqueer, spirit can emerge from the ashes.
Analogies and metaphors aside, what matters here is that book burning is considered legitimate, in fact encouraged, by the dominant strand of so-called “progressive activism” today. But there is nothing progressive about this dogmatic and fanatical activism. Perhaps it is time to call a spade a spade and expose the proselytizing zeal of this new form of evangelism.
In Fahrenheit 451, book burning is not imposed from above by a totalitarian regime; it is the people who want them to be burned. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary,” says Faber, a retired English professor who Montag, the protagonist of Bradbury’s novel, meets on a regular basis:
The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line.
This is indeed the problem with woke activism – not the circus, but self-imposed censorship, voluntary intellectual impoverishment, always hailing from a position of perpetual victimhood.
This is the second and final part of an excerpt from my recently published book, Cancelled: The Left Way Back From Woke (Polity, 2023). The book is available on all major online platforms and bookstores. The Spanish edition of the book, Cancelados: Dejar atrás lo woke por una izquierda más progresista will be published on October 18 (Paidós/Planeta, 2023).