Peter MacDonald
I recently came across a story about Warwick Jordan, owner of Hard to find Books, who is deeply shaken by the National Library of New Zealand’s plan to destroy half a million books. According to the report, Jordan says he had been losing sleep over the news and has made several offers to take the books off the library’s hands to save them from destruction.
He describes these books as more than just old volumes: they represent history, culture and knowledge that deserve preservation. Jordan’s bookstores have long been a refuge for readers seeking rare and overseas titles, many of which now risk being lost. The article conveys his despair at seeing these treasures discarded while the library shifts its focus to digital archives and a narrower range of ‘approved’ titles.
For over 40 years, libraries across New Zealand and the Western world have quietly removed books from their reference shelves: not merely outdated encyclopedias or damaged texts, but works by some of the most pivotal thinkers of the 20th century.
This purge has been going on for years with a massive cull of 600,000 books in 2020 alone. Now, as the National Library prepares to pulp another half a million books, it’s clear this is not about space. It’s about controlling what future generations are allowed to read and what they are made to forget.
The technocratic visionaries (now disappearing)
These were no conspiracy theorists. They were policy architects, global strategists and elite insiders who documented the future as they intended to build it:
- Aldous Huxley – Foretold a world controlled not by force, but by seduction.
- Charles Galton Darwin – Outlined a future of elite control and selective breeding.
- Zbigniew Brzezinski – Proposed the “technetronic era” of surveillance, media control and managed democracy.
- Henry Kissinger – Wrote the diplomatic playbook for realpolitik, global governance and population control.
- Carroll Quigley – Documented the global elite’s control of finance and politics in Tragedy and Hope.
And then there were the thinkers who warned us or offered alternatives:
- Alvin Toffler – In Future Shock and The Third Wave described how technological acceleration would destabilize culture, family and identity.
- Ivan Illich – Exposed how institutions like education, medicine and development were being used to disempower people, create dependency and destroy traditional knowledge and autonomy.
Once staples of university libraries and reading lists, these works are now gone – moved to basements, storage or discarded. Few have been digitised and most are out of print. They are deliberately excluded from the new ‘woke’ curriculum that prizes ideology over inquiry.
The architects and critics of the Deep State
These authors represent just a fraction of visionaries, planners and critics who have shaped or exposed global power:
- Marshall McLuhan – The Medium Is The Message, revealing how technology reshapes consciousness and predicted the ‘global village’.
- Jacque Fresco – Founder of The Venus Project, envisioning a resource-based, tech-driven utopia critical of current power.
- Noam Chomsky – Linguist and fierce critic of propaganda, media manipulation and corporate government power.
- Jacque Ellul – French philosopher dissecting the dominance of technology and propaganda.
- Daniel Bell – Sociologist analysing the shift to post-industrial, information societies.
- Herbert Marcuse – Frankfurt School theorist critiquing culture and technological domination.
And those exposing covert power networks:
- G Edward Griffin – Author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, exposing Federal Reserve control.
- James Petras – Sociologist on imperialism and covert power.
- Peter Dale Scott – Coined the modern term Deep State, revealing covert government operations.
Their disappearance from public libraries is a major blow to public understanding and allows knowledge of global power and control to be confined or erased.
What’s replacing them?
In place of these vital thinkers, we get:
- Approved titles reinforcing state narratives.
- Mass-published identity politics manuals pushed by global publishing houses.
- Superficial digital content disguised as education.
These are not books people seek out; they serve one function: to keep minds occupied but not equipped.
Why it matters
We live in the very future these thinkers described:
- Technocratic rule by unelected experts.
- Surveillance capitalism run by global platforms.
- Artificial consent manufactured through controlled media.
Yet, with the original source material gone, the next generation can neither understand how it happened nor realise it was planned.
The National Library claims it wants to prioritise New Zealand-published books, making room by destroying these ‘old’ titles. But the new books stocked are ideologically filtered, approved and designed to fit current political and cultural agendas. This is cultural control: a communist-style censorship that replaces diverse knowledge with a narrow, sanitised, worldview.
As George Orwell warned in 1984: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”
Conclusion
Warwick Jordan’s anguish over the loss of these half a million books is more than a bookseller’s concern. It’s a national tragedy. The destruction of irreplaceable knowledge and the replacement with ideologically curated content weakens the foundation of critical thinking and freedom.
When a nation’s library becomes a tool of cultural erasure, future generations lose the power to question, to resist and to understand the forces shaping their lives. This is a warning we ignore at our peril.
How to fight back: use their own system
One powerful and underused way to resist this erasure of knowledge is by using libraries’ own book request systems to reorder vanished titles. Every public library in New Zealand allows members to suggest books for purchase. Ten years ago, while I was a member of the Auckland Library, I noticed they had only one copy of Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, a groundbreaking book exposing the hidden architecture of global power. That lone copy was already on loan, so I placed a hold and then used the library’s system to request they order another copy. A few weeks later, they did. I repeated the process every fortnight. By the time I left Auckland, the library had five copies of Tragedy and Hope available for any member of the public to read, learn from and question.
This method is simple, legal and effective. If even a small group of citizens committed to historical literacy began requesting the reintroduction of purged titles, we could help rebuild a public archive of real knowledge, one book at a time.
