I winced pretty hard when I read that.

However, as you might well know, Easter Island went through a century when the population decreased by 90% (due to resource exhaustion). Bad things happened, we know from the archeological record. And at some point, the Easter Islanders seem to have made an agreement and destroyed all their written records from that century - out of shame, it is theorized.

So maybe the destruction of the records of America isn't a bad thing, in the big picture.

(And a lot of history was already lost in the botched move from newspaper records to microfiche.)