Lest We Forget And What We Need To Remember

While New Zealanders commemorate ANZAC Day and repeat the phrase, ‘Lest we forget’, the National Library is pushing forward with its plans to discard more than 600,000 books that constitute a vital part of our intellectual heritage. It is unknown how much we will never be able to remember because of the books and magazines been removed in an Orwellian process that the National Library calls ‘rehoming’.

New Zealanders may not know that the phrase ‘lest we forget’ came from a poem by Rudyard Kipling written in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, the same reason that Victoria University of Wellington carries her name. Will books by Kipling be among the ‘overseas’ publications discarded this year because they do not tell ‘NZ stories’? If so, New Zealanders may not know that the loss of his son in 1915 caused him to write, ‘If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.’ Was Kipling including himself among the fathers who encouraged their sons to enlist? Will our memories recall the ‘lies’ without books published overseas?

Other useful books are also in peril this year that may provide insights into the current crisis. There are books about epidemics and depressions most of which are written by non-New Zealand authors and which appeared before 1990, the cut-off date that renders a book particularly likely for disposal. There are periodicals published during the Depression that inform us about economic crisis, racism, militarism, and crisis leadership that will be discarded even though they exist nowhere else in New Zealand.

Simultaneously justified as fulfilling the National Library’s duty to preserve NZ’s memory and the claim that other national libraries follow the same policy, the policy is inherently flawed and based on faulty premises. Other national libraries including the Library of Congress, the National Library of Australia, the State Libraries of Victoria and New South Wales, and the British Library recognise that the citizens of their countries can learn from other societies as a scrutiny of their catalogues will demonstrate. Why does our National Library act on a different assumption?

Tossing out books that New Zealanders have read in libraries across New Zealand over more than a century is tantamount to throwing away vital parts of our national memories and our intellectual heritage. Just as significantly, the policy demonstrates an arrogance that assumes that a handful of librarians know now all that New Zealanders need to know and that we will never need to learn anything from other societies or from the past which produced these books and magazines.

In a period when we are cut off from international travel and from international visitors, books and magazines offer a substitute for those direct experiences. We can read The Decameron about the plague in the 1300s or Daniel Dafoe’s Journal of the Plague Year about an epidemic in London in 1665. An earlier form of ‘social distancing’ forced Isaac Newton, then a university student, to leave Cambridge and begin a more solitary voyage of intellectual discovery. Are books by and about those important experiences among those items to be discarded? Will George Orwell’s books also find their way to a dumpster? If so, will we know that ‘rehoming’ is not an accurate description for discarding books?

Let us hope that the Minister of Internal Affairs who is also an Associate Minister of Education will rescind her approval. If not, the destruction of these books and magazines will damage New Zealand education and vital knowledge about the world inside and outside our shores.

Dolores Janiewski is an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington where she teaches the Cold War and the history of the Americas.

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