The Library of Alexandria was

The Library of Alexandria was once one of the world's greatest wonders, containing the writings of an endless number of philosophers and so called "prophets" on whose writings the Bible was based, like the New Testament on the orders and choice of stories by the Bishop Athanasius in 393.

Then, during one of the Muslim crusades sweeping North Africa, Alexandria was occupied in 640 and the commander asked Mecca for instructions on what to do with the library?

He received the reply that " if the library contains the words of the Koran we know them, if not they're heresies and don't need them", so the guy burned the whole thing. This is why there are no originals of the so called "scriptures".

Basically the same mentality used by all fundamentalist "faiths", including the Harper gang. The accident that they have been born as so called "Christians" makes no difference, because the name of the religion they follow is just another word and could be anything.

The same with ideologues, where capitalists and communists claim to be on opposing sides, but their leaderships are the same predators with the same "conservative" mentalities, demanding dictatorial ruling powers.

Ed Deak.

Deeply Frightening

Prof. Gutstein is a tireless scholar and writer. His observations about Harper are deeply frightening.

It is like we are living through a dream (nightmare). We try and wake up to the 'real' world where things are safe. But we cannot.

What will our fate be? Will we do nothing and watch 100 years of Canadian democracy swirl down the drain of intolerance and extremism? How is it that a tiny minority of people can force us to accept so many things that are unjust, destructive and wrong. Have we learned nothing from the 1930's European fascism?

Great coverage.

Unbelieveable

But not unexpected. Anyone who talks to right-wingers knows all too well their thin grasp of history and how they think we'd be better off if everyone else knew as little.

Book Burning

After attending the Shout Out Against Mining Injustice last week-end, and reading the articles by Maude Barlow and the distinguished writer above, I think it's time for a good ol' fashioned book burning, one in each major city, right downtown in a visible location. I suggest the Indian Act, and other such travesties, and any books of destruction (e.g. Ethical Oil).

Any other suggestions?

As a member of two historical societies and archival groups I am appalled by these cuts.
As someone recently pointed out, Mr Harper is not in favour of people having "information".

Greg Shea (Lake Cowichan)

Not quite Frank...

It's not that right-wingers have a thin grasp of history. It's that they don't need history because they just know what is right for all of us.

We are so lucky to be ruled by guys who know that global warming is a bunch of crap or at the very least they know that Canada will be warmer and that has to be good. They also know that selling oil and coal to everyone and anyone has got to be a good thing because they also know that some guys will become millionaires and they will happily contribute to the cause. They also just know that we don't need a national housing program because they and everyone they know already has a house.

There is so much more that they know so we should just relax and enjoy the inevitable prosperity for all, or at the very least, all the conservatives.

"...he who controls the past

"...he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past..."

Honestly, it's getting tiresome, wondering which Orwellian cliche the Right will act out next.

Book Legging

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Looks like Walter Miller wasn't that far off, with his post-apocalyptic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz:
A Canticle for Leibowitz opens 600 years after 20th century civilization has been destroyed by a global nuclear war, known as the "Flame Deluge". The text reveals that as a result of the war there was a violent backlash against the culture of advanced knowledge and technology that had led to the development of nuclear weapons. During this backlash, called the "Simplification," anyone of learning, and eventually anyone who could even read, was likely to be killed by rampaging mobs, who proudly took on the name of "Simpletons". Illiteracy became almost universal, and books were destroyed en masse.

Isaac Edward Leibowitz had been a Jewish electrical engineer working for the United States military. Surviving the war, he converted to Roman Catholicism and founded a monastic order, the "Albertian Order of Leibowitz", dedicated to preserving knowledge by hiding books, smuggling them to safety (booklegging), memorizing, and copying them.

The Library of Alexandria

did not meeet its final fate like Fiat Lux states, at the hands of the Muslims. When Julius Caesar conquered the city, a firestorm got out of control and burned most of the books. Books were taken from Pergamon's library to replaces the burned ones in Alexandria. Then the Emperor Aurelian, when conquering the city, also had some of the books burned. The, Christians, in 391 AD, in trying to exterminate any so-called pagan materials including science destroyed the last remaining library the Serapeum. By the time the Muslims arrived, there was not much left and Saladin wanted anything that related to Shiism burned. The quote used by Fiat Lux maybe a hoax and in any case, most scholarly texts on the burning of the Library do not blame the Muslims. But Christians burning books on science they don't believe in, sound familiar??

The Library Mystery

It seems no one quite knows about the demise of the Library of Alexandria:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2233/what-happened-to-the-great-library-of-alexandria
How did it come to an end? We don't know exactly--in fact, we know very little about the library's history. That hasn't prevented historians over the centuries from proposing various scenarios. The three main suspects are Julius Caesar, Bishop Theophilus, and Caliph Omar. Contrary to myth, there wasn't one great fire that destroyed the library, but instead several documented fires over a span of centuries. It seems likely, then, that the destruction of the library was gradual. The problem is that we have few contemporary accounts, and later writers often have some axe to grind.

RickW, I hadn't heard of that

RickW, I hadn't heard of that novel before, but reading the description naturally reminded me of Ray Bradbury's death today and his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Also related to this issue denying access to information is the closing down of the Community Web Access Program as described in this recent Tyee article:

Feds' Quiet Cut to Community Web Access Program
Omitted from the budget, a 17-year initiative providing Internet to the disadvantaged gets unplugged. By Michael Geist
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2012/04/17/Community-Web-Access-Cut/

"The recent federal budget was a hefty 498 pages, but it still omitted disclosing the decision to eliminate funding for the Community Access Program, Canada's longstanding initiative to provide an Internet access alternative for those without connectivity."

edward...The story of the

edward...The story of the burning of the library I have contributed may be a hoax, but I've read it in a number of books and just checked it on the Net, where it also appears.

Unfortunately, I wasn't there when it happened , so I can only quote what I've read and studied over the years.

But I was there when the books of Jewish authors were burned in Europe, although, even as a teenager, I never took any part. One of my favourite books was a collection of poems by the German poet Heine, which I hid carefully and was scared stiff, worrying, when the cops will come to search the house and arrest my whole family.

And even at that, the stupidest and most criminal bookburning I was forced to perform, myself, was by the US Army in Obertraun, Austria in the late summer of 1945.

After I recovered for an infected legwound I worked as a volunteer POW orderly in a German military hospital located in a former mountain artillery training camp.

The camp had a great library, and let's face it German books were always of the highest quality.

One day the commandant was ordered by the high command that all books featuring the swastika had to be burned.

Obviously, there were some books with nazi contents, but all books, regardless of content, had a small nazi eagle with the swastika in its claws, on the very bottom of the back of the second page, of all books printed after 1933, showing that they were passed by the censors.

Another guy and myself were ordered to check all the books in the library and then take out and burn all those that featured that tiny swastika at the bottom of that page, which meant practically all of them.

I went to the officers and showed how easily we could cut that thing out, without damaging the books, but "orders were orders" and we burned thousands of the most fantastic books on art and everything else.

Being confined to that camp, I don't know how widespread the practice was, but it was criminal at any level.

The nazis burned the books by Jewish authors, but the insane US military forced the burnings of the books, regardless of authors and subjects, some of the treasured classics for a tiny symbol that could have been easily removed.

Of course, nobody talks about such things and I've never read about it in any of the books on the history and aftermath of WW2.

Ed Deak.

So much to write when you know the real reasons....

It must be so easy to carp or in the ndp/lib world out there - crap about things of which you know absolutely NOTHING. I am in the hated city of Ottawa…so suck it up. I worked with another federal department that was forced to work with the Archives for 35 years (in fact, all fed depts. are forced to work with LAC – federal legislation).

During the 90’s when the then Chretien government removed – as in completely SHUT DOWN the only ‘check’ in the checks and balance system of the then Archives which was a watchdog to make sure every federal department had to follow correct protocol in how to keep and file government documents (this is legally, and chronologically, not necessarily historically). So Chretien comes along and guts this part of the department which then allowed all departments to do whatever they wanted with their government records. No one (in Ottawa) could understand this….and curious that there were no Tyee complaints back then (1993) about how an internal watchdog got shut (the watchdog section had 15 people). This was the precursor to the Shawinigate/AdScam/Boondoggle etc. . Chretien removed that audit function that LAC did back then, before it came to my department – Auditor General. They would tip us off to which areas which were keeping faulty record systems. Very few people knew about this area – except, oddly enough, Chretien. He personally directed it to be shut down and removed the legislation that would allow it to be resurrected again. That was what that majority left government did while the other side on the right was flailing around.

And also, to correct you, BIBLES are published materials so they are held in the Library portion of LAC. Non- published documents/manuscripts/etc. are kept in the archives portion of LAC.

part2

That’s the difference and that is what makes the library portion worth keeping. The only portion worth keeping in the archives is the genealogy part – they actually work and are useful to the public. In 2007 the archivists felt it would be better to pass off their mandate of holding information to every other federal department. They have been having conferences and committees with various federal departments to explain that they are handing their responsibilities back to everyone else BUT they want to be the ‘coordinator’ of records scattered all over the federal government. If all federal departments keep their own records then the archives is quite useless. Plus each department knows what is necessary, historical and legal to keep, more than a history degree who really knows nothing of the value of other federal department records.

And let's be clear about history degrees. Most people think their degrees are about the history of the world…they are NOT. Each history degree is a tiny, tiny portion of one part of one country of one era or epoch in the time continuum. I had to work with a woman whose degree was a small part of Quebec’s history of Montreal hookers. Of course you would call this ‘social history’. So, this woman actually demanded that records from another department which fit perfectly for her degree (as in helping her complete her thesis) were sent to LAC. She used these records on government time to complete her thesis AND published a book on Montreal hookers in a 20 year period in a one block radius in the 1800’s – and ALL on government time.

The rest of the archives has reverted back to its self-loving ivory tower (tyee kingdoms). For years the ‘amazing archivists’ REFUSED to deal with the lower entities of other government workers in other departments. I remember people being put on hold – literally – for months…yes…- MONTHS before a ‘superior history degree’ would deign to bother to return any calls or allow anyone non-history to be in their sacred presence.

part3

Let’s remember that these people are at the bottom of the university food chain and clearly they have problems because of it. For all the people that must have mocked them in school, they have brought their insecurities and overinflamed egos into the workplace, in spades. Ergo, that was why they fought so hard (8 years) to get out of PSAC and into PIPS, even though they clearly did not qualify for any professional accreditation. So, they wanted the salary of smarter people – engineers, doctors, tech people, economists, scientists…..all made $20,000-40,000 more than memory degrees.

And this question of why so many digital staff have been cleared out? That has nothing to do with Harper or James Moore. The Deputy Minister has given the ADMs and DGs the responsibility to decide which areas can be cut. This department will cut everyone before they cut one historian/archivist. They will die before a peer promoted buddy is kicked out. And that is another feather in LACs cap. Again, in 2007 they actually set up a ‘career promotion program plan’ and every archivist is invited to join. Basically every history degree in the place is encouraged to join this ‘career planning path’ and what this means is: you and everyone else will get ‘peer promoted’ and even if you stay in the same job for 30 years your salary will keep going up because your coworkers will keep voting you and themselves pay raises. This is the problem of LAC. They are very good at taking hissy fits if they can’t be able to self-reward themselves on a regular basis.

part4

The budget feds don’t like to see money going places it isn’t supposed to be going. Millions will go to their pensions that could have gone to health care, environmental inspections, anything but to a bunch of people who do not deserve raises without earning them.

So they went out to all departments – under their favourite ways of conferences etc. and told everyone that LAC would become the ‘conduit’ of accessing all federal documents BUT all federal departments had to keep all this stuff in their own department, not LACs. They were also very big on using ‘cloud’ record keeping (before it was set up). If you really want to see which federal department that understands the meaning of history and legal legislation – access something from the Bank of Canada. They have their own vault and no one gets in there. Same with Stats Can. Their businesses are information and they use historical documents for projections. They also keep their own stuff.

The smart departments have never EVER sent their stuff to LAC because historians do not understand the value of most documents they hold (unless they figure they can write books out of them to make money on the government dime). By the way, they fought to get a ‘perk’ in their job descriptions that gave them the right to do ‘personal time’ during their work day. This ‘personal time’ amounted to 30% of EACH work day. From what I heard their personal time was writing books on government records, or running hockey/baseball pools for cash, or playing the stock market on government computers, or watching porn, or spending time in one of the very close bars/taverns/strip joints. So professional and necessary to be paid for their personal development. As well, half of the department is married to most of the other half. And those who are not married are having affairs with the rest of the department. That seemed to be a big thing there.

Kooks

Many of us are just so tired of being governed and advised by Kooks. Really do Michael and Gordon Campbell, The Fraser Institute, Christy Clark, Steven Harper, The University of Oil er Calgary etc, have anything to contribute to an egalitarian society? Of course not, they are simply sociopathic corporate lackeys.

part5

The actual purpose of the archives was to maintain the 5% of the federal government documents that are considered ‘essential records’. For example, if the BC enviro-screamers or QC rioting students decide it is okay to firebomb some federal building, it is supposed to be LAC’s job to be able to recover their essential records. Essential records are the records that tell people who owns whose land (as in Treaty rights and other property sales after that, along with boundaries – like us vs Alaska and the 49th parallel). As well, essential records are also laws and legislations. Or, to put it simply, if some group in BC decides they want to squat or overtake or ruin some neighbourhood, then the essential records would be the legal legislation that govern a free democracy – and like it or not, the PC government is a democracy – particularly when it is cleaning up crooked liberal legacies left behind – and assuming they would be in power forever and never have to clean up.

In 1985 Dr. Jean-Pierre Wallot became the Dominion Archivist. (His term was 1985-1999.) He was a very organized structured academic put into the bureaucrat world. He absolutely hated the inefficiencies and snottiness of the Archives and he told them so. Because they were not used to anyone questioning their ivory tower attitude and self-proclaimed amazingness, once he told them they were not special and needed to do their bleeping jobs better, they immediately hated him. There was a core group led by a few middle managers who got very used to being paid to do very little and insanely mad at this guy walking down the hall to tell them to get off their duffs and get working properly and efficiently. This core group devoted themselves entirely to sabotaging the brand new procedures Wallot put in to fix the place. They constantly undermined everything he set up. They went out of their way to trash his legislation and ignored pretty much everything he set up. Non-history people were threatened to shut up and help them screw things or they’d get them fired. Wallot told them that if they didn’t get out of the 1930’s attitude the world would move on without them and make the department useless. He also set up an email link to his office and begged staff to tell him who and where threats were happening.

part6

He retired just before turning 65 and the next National Archivist was nothing more than a puppet of the core undermining group. The 10 years of Ian Wilson’s tenure was devoted solely to undoing everything Wallot set up. Also during that time the government decided to lump the library and archives back together (throughout government history this happens every 20-30 years- they are put together, then taken apart).

So, the core group of poisonous archivists had managed to put themselves back in their special ivory towers just like they had it in the 30’s. Most of the driving forces in this backward enterprise have since retired or jumped ship (mostly to Heritage and PCO) to save their puffed up pensions but there are still a few in LAC to make sure nothing ever moves forward. A few archivists actually wrote the ‘history of the archives’ and completely erased Dr. Wallot’s 15 year tenure – because they hated him so much for making them work and pushing them into the new century. They actually lied and claimed they were wandering in the wilderness until Ian Wilson took the job. And you are worried about Harper rewriting history? Clearly you’ve spent no time with anyone from an Ottawa French or immersion school or a Quebec school. The history of Canada has been rewritten so many times in the education system your heads would spin. This is the same system Mulcair was raised in and he is the poster child of ‘je me souviens’.

And in continuing your concern of Harper rewriting history? Guess again. The special federal archivists consider themselves ‘co-creators’. They will actually tell you that if ‘they’ consider your records important enough (in their consideration, not in reality) then they will request them to be kept. Otherwise they won’t bother. They actually think that by choosing their favourite stuff then they are co-creators. They also have no problem putting their names on other peoples work – whether they did anything with it at all or even decided to ‘keep’ it. In their minds they co-created every census and everything else that is sent to them. They are truly bizarre egomaniacal low self-esteemed people.

part7

They went out to all departments – under their favourite ways of conferences etc. and told everyone that LAC would become the ‘conduit’ of accessing all federal documents BUT all federal departments had to keep all this stuff in their own department, not LACs. They were also very big on using ‘cloud’ record keeping (before it was set up). If you really want to see which federal department that understands the meaning of history and legal legislation – access something from the Bank of Canada. They have their own vault and no one gets in there. Same with Stats Can. Their businesses are information and they use historical documents for projections. They also keep their own stuff.

The smart departments don’t sent their stuff to LAC because historians do not understand the value of most documents they hold (unless they figure they can write books out of them to make money on the government dime). By the way, they fought to get a ‘perk’ in their job descriptions that gave them the right to do ‘personal time’ during their work day. This ‘personal time’ amounted to 30% of EACH work day. From what I heard their personal time was writing books on government records, or running hockey/baseball pools for cash, or playing the stock market on government computers, or watching porn, or spending time in one of the very close bars/taverns/strip joints. So professional and necessary to be paid for their personal development. As well, half of the department is married to most of the other half. And those who are not married are having affairs with the rest of the department. That seemed to be a big thing there.

part8

The current National Archivist (Daniel Caron) actually has no idea what these people are doing under his nose. They have become very well versed in scamming their boss if the boss wants them to work. They either ignore and undermine the boss or turn him into a puppet. We feel sorry for this guy – he is actually trying to fix the place. One of the core group who worked his way very high up actually would tell other staff members that he knew what to say to the Archivist to throw him off what they were really doing. The entire thing is sad but kudos to Harper and his government for finding out what little these people do and how much they suck out of the budget.

And two more things with the money factor- these people are paid far too much for the little they do and they are not actually supposed to be in that money bracket at all. Plus, this is a tiny department of 500-600 people and yet they could blow out $2,000,000 in conferences/dinners/booze in one year. Compare that to Transport Canada who also blew out that amount of money with 15,000 staff. Go figure.

LAC could survive with less than 100 useful genealogy people and library people. The rest should be cut off because their pensions will suck out as much money from the budget for no reason at all. And as far as collecting history? The best historians are the private sector ones who publish factual and correct information.

If you want to find a good academic archivist look to Luciana Duranti, UBC. She’s a forward thinker, well organized and has in the past told the LAC core group that they are going in the wrong direction. Needless to say, they hate her too. So she must be smart….

Community Web Access Program Cancellation

Perry:
Yet (from what I hear), regarding EI, the government is going to e-mail job listings to EI applicants.......

Go figure.

Think....Thanks for the

Think....Thanks for the interesting stories on politicians. I've lived under every known ideological system and behind the scenes they're all the same and could switch places and offices at any time.

They may be waving different coloured flags and claim adherence to different ideologies, but under the skin they're all the same incompetent, power hungry people.

This is why I've been writing for over 25 years that ideologies have no "wings", but are divided by a thin, vertical line, like the C and F on thermometers.

University degrees have never given any brains to anybody. All they show that a certain person passed some tests on some subjects.

In my working life I have had daily contact with literally hundreds of highly "educated" people and "captains of industry", in their homes, offices and boardrooms, and was often shocked over their abysmal ignorance of the simplest facts and happenings in the world.

Half of the Harper cabinet, including the boss, look and act like escapees from mental institutions. Where they belong, with the vast majority of so called "economists".

Ed Deak.

ThinkDifferently

Your long-winded rant has nothing to do with the article and seems to be nothing more than the result of a personal vendetta you have against the people at LAC.

Why not address the points that Gutstein brought up in the article instead of making the unsubstantiated allegation that LAC workers are watching porn on their computers 30% of the time? As if nobody watches porn on their computers in private business. Never worked at a software company full of 20-something males have you?

By the way

Researchers do use government data. Perhaps you think economists gather their own statistics? They don't. They depend on things like the census and other government data gathering.

And it gets worse. Media depend on those same economists and government data. So I guess that means everything depends on the "government dime".