I’ve always been a reader. My mother taught my siblings and me at 3, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Even now, as I write, I’m a little giddy: two new books are coming for me to the post office.

Libraries were my first love, which is why the repeated destruction of the Library of Alexandria haunts me. Imagine the knowledge we lost — maps, methods, histories, heresies and wonders. Imagine the voices we will never hear. Some of those fires were deliberate. Who burns knowledge?

History answers: authoritarians do. And the pattern that follows is consistent and grim.

In 213 B.C., Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, ordered the burning of books and the burying of scholars to crush dissent, especially Confucian thought. “Practical” texts — medicine, agriculture, engineering — were spared; independent inquiry was not. Scholars who resisted were buried alive. The Qin dynasty ended in blood and backlash.

Nazi Germany staged mass book burnings within months of Hitler’s rise. Students and officials tossed “un-German” works into flames — Jewish writers, liberals, pacifists, modernists. That frenzy of censorship foreshadowed far worse: ghettos, camps, war, annihilation.

The Soviet Union perfected a system of silencing: banned books, imprisoned authors, censored newspapers, and a state media that called propaganda truth. Writers who strayed were forced into exile, labor camps or silence. Even attempted free press became a crime.

Under apartheid, South Africa outlawed texts that challenged white supremacy or promoted racial unity. Black authors were banned in their own country. Ideas were treated as contraband, and fear did the rest.

These regimes all claimed necessity. They said they were protecting order, purity, tradition or safety. What they really protected was power. Censorship didn’t make them strong; it made them brittle. Repression forged resistance, and the reckoning came.

So when I — a twice honorably discharged U.S. Army veteran of active duty and the National Guard — watch my own country flirt with those same impulses, I get edgy.

I hear talk of revoking broadcast licenses. I see campaigns to push people off the air. I see school districts purging shelves, universities chilled by donors and legislators, peaceful protesters kettled and cuffed, due process bent into a pretzel, and leaders mainlining violent rhetoric for clicks.

When these things happen, a nation is coming apart. History says so. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result isn’t strategy; it’s insanity.

Fortunately, the censorship battles, while nationwide, have not come to Wrangell, which speaks well of people here.

I want to be on the right side of history. I don’t want anyone emboldened to oppress my neighbors, whatever their pretext or party. That’s the country I enlisted to serve — the country my grandfather fought for in World War II — a nation confident enough to argue in the open and brave enough to let bad ideas be beaten by better ones.

The antidote to fear is freedom, and the proof of freedom is the shelf you’re allowed to browse. Let the classroom be messy, the library thick with disagreement, the airwaves loud. Let the censors make their case — and lose it. I want to read what I want, not tea leaves after the books are burned.

Because once the bonfires start, they rarely stop where their makers intend. They leap fences, scorch the innocent and leave only ash where a common shelf, and a common future, might have stood together.