A little food for thought for you today. (What follows certainly was crunchy food for thought for my brain.)
I’ve started reading “A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq” by Fernando Báez, translated by Alfred MacAdam. Within the introduction, Báez points out that when one society wants to dominate or take over another, one of its first actions is to attempt to wipe out the other society’s cultural memory. To do this, it targets libraries and museums, the repositories of cultural memory. Given this fact, why do some people consider libraries and museums to be fluff – nice, but unnecessary to a fully functioning society?
While you ponder that, also consider this: Libraries and museums have been targets throughout history, not just in some dimly lit past, but straight up to today. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted at the beginning of the Iraq War.