Sunday 23rd of August 2026
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when books tell the truth in another language....

 

A confronting display can be reconsidered. Removing a documented critique of the war on Gaza from a public library collection would be another matter entirely.

Sydney’s Waverley Council, which includes Bondi Beach within its boundaries, has removed a book on the war on Gaza, titled How to Sell a Genocide, from its library shelves, pending review. This followed a complaint from a survivor of last year’s Bondi Beach massacre.

 

Heather L. Robinson

How to Sell a Genocide – libraries are for difficult books too

 

The Sydney Morning Herald has reported the council received “multiple complaints” about the book by media analyst Adam Johnson, which centres on a detailed critique of the United States mainstream media and its “culpability” in shaping public perceptions of the war in Gaza.

The president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni, told the Guardian it is a “library’s duty to provide its community access to a broad range of published works, including those that may challenge or discomfort”.

It’s not surprising that a survivor was “distressed” by the prominent display of a book with genocide in the title, especially displayed on the ‘new release / hot item’ shelf. Was it thoughtless or insensitive, in a council area that is home to one of Australia’s largest Jewish communities, close to the site of the December 2025 massacre? Many may think so.

But should the book, currently being reviewed, be permanently removed from the collection at Waverley library at Bondi Junction? That’s a hard ‘no’ from me. It would counteract the library’s stated aims to provide “something for all ages and tastes”, including “non-fiction titles in all subject areas”.

We trust libraries for difficult things

In my research for a book published last year, I surveyed and interviewed close to 200 people, mostly in Australia, about their use of and relationship with public libraries.

Libraries are democratic civic spaces – and a major source of information. Denying people access to that information deprives them of the ability to learn with and from each other. This is against the principles of Australian public libraries, as set out by the Australian Libraries and Information Association.

My research shows people trust libraries to help them navigate the world and all its challenges: from access to digital services, to learning about government or world events. (Particularly the ugly, knotty events.)

One person told me ‘their’ library “signifies the essential goodness in society, upholding and defending the right to learn, and the value of knowledge being freely accessible, as a cornerstone of a progressive society”.

Waverley Council was at pains to say its book curation is outsourced, in a statement to the Guardian. Book curation is usually done by a council’s librarians. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, some libraries outsource selection and purchasing of books to specialist suppliers that deal directly with publishers. It’s unclear at this stage exactly how Waverley sources its books.

It should be noted that regular reviews of a library’s collection are standard practice. A review does not mean that this book will be discarded from the collection.

Public collections are at the heart of what a library provides: in Waverley as elsewhere. They influence public programs and service the needs of their specific community’s diverse interests and tastes. The library is the keeper of the public’s memory. We should keep this in mind.

‘A place of learning’

What libraries represent in Australia is persistently linked with democracy and freedom of thought. People I spoke to for my research insisted the library is a “place of learning, a safe place for free exchange of ideas beyond political, religious, or ideological boundaries”. They also said it gave them a sense of belonging. “Made me part of Australia.”

Some members of Australia’s Jewish community are understandably feeling isolated from the broader Australian community. The title of the book under review is confronting, given the recent deaths of 15 people in the antisemitic attack on Bondi Beach.

However, How to Sell a Genocide is based on careful documentation of some 12,000 articles and 5,000 television clips. As journalism expert Jeff Sparrow said in his review, the International Association of Genocide Scholars describes the Israeli war on Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. Almost all the major human rights organisations and NGOs agree.

In Australia meanwhile, a 2024 report noted the number of library users had increased by 10 per cent on the previous year, to 88 million. Use of library collections is at an all-time high. As one young interview subject told me:

The thing about the internet is it’s too specific … it kind of forces you to be in your own head, right? … But the Library, you can just come across something spontaneously […] then you’ll be intrigued and look at it. I like that.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/08/how-to-sell-a-genocide-has-been-removed-from-a-library-near-bondi-but-libraries-represent-freedom-of-thought/

 

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Zelensky government orders destruction of 100 million books

On 19 May 2022, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy issued instructions the Ukrainian Book Institute to destroy all books published in Russia, printed in Russian or translated from the Russian language.

According to the director of the Book Institute and former president of the Publishers’ Forum, Oleksandra Koval (photo), it will be necessary to destroy at least 100 million books that convey evil. Some works will be preserved by university libraries for specialists to study the roots of Evil.

This auto-da-fé also targets all the classcis of Russian literature from Alexander Pushkin to Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

This information was covered up by former Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who on 21 May posted a tweet (since removed) denounced Russia for burning Ukrainian books; a totally false accusation.

Two lessons are to be drawn from these events:
 We had not witnessed a destruction of books on such a scale since the Second World War and the Nazi burnings.
 NATO is perfectly aware of what is happening, otherwise it would not have attempted to obfuscate the issue.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article217312.html

 

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PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

 

books of ideas.....

Executive summary

Court filings and reporting show that at least one AI developer—Anthropic—ran a program that bought used books, cut their spines for high‑speed industrial scanning, and disposed of the paper originals; a federal judge treated that kind of destructive digitization as lawful “fair use” in certain circumstances [1][2]. Broader claims that multiple AI firms are secretly buying and burning millions of rare books are a mix of documented practices, vendor marketing, and less‑conclusive marketplace reports — the strongest, verifiable evidence centers on Anthropic’s documented project and its contractors, not a verified, industry‑wide purge of irreplaceable works [3][4].

https://factually.co/fact-checks/technology/are-books-scanned-in-ai-data-centers-and-then-burned-ce93f0

 

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Today In Dystopia: Burning Books For Israel, Burning Books For AI

Today in dystopia they’re really going after books. A library in Sydney has removed the book “How to Sell a Genocide” by Adam Johnson from its shelves after Zionists complained about its criticisms of Israeli mass atrocities in Gaza.

BY Caitlin Johnstone

 

I’ve been putting out more and more of these “today in dystopia” write-ups because our society is plunging into iron-fisted authoritarianism and AI-induced idiocracy so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up with how it’s unfolding day by day without shoveling multiple stories into a single essay.

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Today in dystopia they’re really going after books. A library in Sydney has removed the book “How to Sell a Genocide” by Adam Johnson from its shelves after Zionists complained about its criticisms of Israeli mass atrocities in Gaza.

The Guardian reports:

“A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.

“Waverley library at Bondi Junction is in the same council area as Bondi beach.

“A Waverley council spokesperson said: “The book has been removed from library shelves for review, and council will further consider processes to ensure closer oversight of book selection.”

“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson commented. “But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding. The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters.”

So in Australia they’re now banning books for Israel. I guess it was only a matter of time.

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Also today in dystopia, Amazon is buying and destroying rare books in a secret facility to train AI. 

404 Media has been doing some great reporting on how companies like Google and Anthropic have been buying up rare and out-of-print books to train their LLM models before destroying them, and now 404 has a new article out describing how its reporters placed a tracking device on a shipment of books and followed it to an Amazon warehouse where the books are being scanned and shredded.

Here’s an excerpt:

“That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.”

That’s right: the logo for Amazon’s book-destroying location is an angry tyrannosaurus preparing to rip apart a book.

These people are just cartoonishly creepy.

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Today in dystopia, police and government agencies in the United States have been using gloves which deliver painful electric shocks in order to subdue their targets.

Mother Jones reports:

“In early August, ICE revealed plans to purchase $20 million worth of electric-shock gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies. The gloves work on direct contact with exposed skin and deliver a painful electric charge. Police departments, jails, and even school resource officers across the country have used the gloves for years — though human rights groups like Amnesty International say they’re ‘readily misused for torture.’ Police officers, speaking on Compliant Technologies’ own YouTube channel, repeatedly stated that the shock gloves work because they are ‘less conducive to lawsuits’ than other forms of physical force, and can cause pain but ‘leave no burn marks or scars.’”

This new form of tyrannical abuse is spreading like wildfire. A local news station in Omaha, Nebraska reports that these shock gloves are present in dozens of schools throughout the city, and have been used multiple times.

Coming soon to a protest near you.

Today in dystopia, the Israeli government is working harder and harder to manipulate the information AI chatbots feed their users about Israel and its myriad military projects in the middle east.

Politico reports:

“Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum.

“French PR firm Havas Media, which runs the lion’s share of Israel’s FARA-registered foreign influence work in the U.S., appears to have stood up an ‘institute’ aimed at feeding LLMs positive information about Israel via one of its subcontractors, boutique ad agency Piro, Inc.”

This builds on previous reporting from Drop Site News about FARA revelations showing that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale secured a lucrative deal with Israel to set up dummy pro-Israel websites designed to be read not by humans, but by the web crawlers that LLMs get their information from. Drop Site found that Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity were the AI companies most vulnerable to Parscale’s manipulations.

Politico’s reporting focuses on a similar strategy from a pro-Israel website calling itself “the Hanover Institute for Public Policy,” whose propaganda articles were found to have influenced the output of both Perplexity and ChatGPT on the subjects of Gaza, anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

I used to think the future would look like flying cars and wisecracking robot butlers, but it turns out it looks like every facet of society being taken over by LLMs that are aggressively manipulated by the state of Israel.

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Today in dystopia it’s becoming more and more common for online commenters to accuse me of using AI to write my essays, which I have never done and will never do.

I hate that this is a thing now. I’ve been writing essays every day for a decade, and nobody who’s been reading me for a long time believes I use AI. But now that so many people are using these creepy chatbots to do everything for them, people believe it’s impossible for a human brain to produce a few paragraphs of text. 

I don’t mind the accusations, I just hate what it says about where we’re heading as a species. These things have only existed for a few years, but some people are already forgetting what it was like to be able to use your own mind to complete simple cognitive tasks. I find it deeply disturbing.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/08/20/today-in-dystopia-burning-books-for-israel-burning-books-for-ai/

 

READ FROM TOP.

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….