Human Events Online names ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries

[ocarinagirl]

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Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Posted May 31, 2005

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

1. The Communist Manifesto


Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manisto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.

2. Mein Kampf


Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called “Beer Hall Putsch” that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out “lebensraum” (“living room”) for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao


Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the “Cultural Revolution” he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

4. The Kinsey Report


Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. “Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. “The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial.”

5. Democracy and Education


Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

6. Das Kapital


Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

7. The Feminine Mystique


Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy


Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, “I have naturally ceased to believe in God.” Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term “sociology.” He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond “theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

9. Beyond Good and Evil


Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: “‘God is dead’--Nietzsche” followed by “‘Nietzsche is dead’--God.” Nietzsche’s profession that “God is dead” appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money


Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

In other news, I'm off to the library. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[ July 06, 2005, 01:09 PM: Message edited by: Bad Andi ]

[Nick]

Have fun, most read like medication warning labels.

Figures a group of regressive, would-be bookburners would list Keynes, Nietzsche, and Dewey in the same category as Hitler and Mao.

[Dusty]

Is there a liberal counterpart?

[CaptHayfever]

^Probably, but the usual reporters here wouldn't complain about it.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[Nick]

Naming literature as "harmful" isn't exactly a liberal trait...its an ignorant one.

[Dylan]

~Dylan

[Nick]

^Idiot.

[ocarinagirl]

Originally posted by CaptHayfever:
^Probably, but the usual reporters here wouldn't complain about it.

I haven't seen anything about a liberal counterpart yet. =/

And yes, naming literature as harmful is unbelievably stupid.

[CaptHayfever]

^Agreed.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[Dylan]

Originally posted by The Great Tyrant:
^Idiot.

Killjoy.

~Dylan

[Glyph Phoenix]

Hey. Just because people make pictures of people being killed by books in MS Paint does not make them an idiot.

[Juliet]

Literature can be harmful because language is one of the most powerful tools in manipulating human minds. Surely you've read at least one book in your lifetime that played with your mind and made you seriously question your views on a particular subject. A smart author who knows his or her rhetorical strategies can persuade any too-open-minded reader into accepting absolutely anything as the truth.

Anything that is powerful has the potential to be destructive, and if you don't believe books can be powerful, look at the Bible. That single book has influenced more masses throughout history than any army or weapon ever has, and I know that quite a few people on this board would call this a harmful influence.

The fact that something doesn't directly cause physical injury doesn't make it harmless.

[ July 20, 2005, 11:15 PM: Message edited by: Elphaba: Wicked Witch of the West ]

[ocarinagirl]

Of course I know that literature is a powerful tool. What I'm mad about is how some people categorize books by Nietzsche, Kinsey, Friedan, Keynes, hell, even Marx as "harmful" simply because they don't correlate with some beliefs and actually promote change. I even know that my sister had to read Mien Kampf for English class, not because the teachers were promoting Nazism but because they wanted to expose students to the "other side of the story" so to speak.

What the people on that panel are doing is essentially promoting a book-burning mentality and that's what I'm kind of pissed about.

[darkintention]

I love how people always take that quote from Nietzsche out of context. Nietsche didn't say it, it was a character of his playing out a point, and the character was lamenting man's abuse of what God is, not celebrating a freedom from God.

Good thing there is such a thing as critical thinking. Otherwise this list would mean something.

[Nick]

People who would read these works (and they are, for the most part, written in a way that resembles the warnings on a prescription drug ad in a magazine--though Mein Kampf is an exception) aren't usually going to suddenly say "Yeah, i totally reject god and all of the things I've fully believed in my entire life." People generally aren't going to convert to an idea or belief just because they read a really neat book on the idea. Seriously.

Regardless if the Bible itself is (in the long haul) better or worse for mankind in general doesn't take away from the fact that it would be idiotic to label it as "Harmful" and advocate censorship and/or burning of said religious text. Since you need clarification as to why this list is a completely dumb idea, I'll elaborate title to title.

If anyone would like to refute Marx's main point that history has been a class struggle, I'd like to hear it. Because, you know, it was. Furthermore, Marxian communism wasn't applied in the Soviet Union. That would be a state-central military dictatorship. Same goes with China, Korea, Vietnam, and other shell-countries.

Looking at things like Mein Kampf is extremely important when examining post WWI Europe and the rise of the Nazis. Only a total ****ing moron would sweep it under a rug because of Nazism. You're supposed to learn from history so you don't repeat it, not ignore it.

Repeat above except substitute Mao for Hitler and China for Germany. And the time periods.
Its also an interesting look as to the third world perception of the US at the time, which was often one of confusion due to the hardline and often blind policy taken towards developing countries.

Sex isn't a bad thing. Studies on sexual behavior have a point when researching sociological trends as well as monitering culture.

Developing thinking tools (ie: learning from doing) is extremely important to development, though Dewey's educational reforms were never fully implemented in the US and were actually scrapped during the Cold War in favor of developing minds to support the military/industrial advances required during the Cold War. If he influenced education its indirectly through later thinkers who drew on his ideas. Regardless, if this is "harmful," I must be missing the boat on this one.

in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.

Outsourcings to Asia, the Pacific Islands, India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and every other developing place where companies go to pay workers extremely low wages for long days to make extreme profits.

Oh no, someone who doesn't think women should be in the kitchen cooking dinner and making babies. Thank god. It only took like 4000 years for people to figure out that women have other uses in society.

A French thinker during the revolution who didn't buy into that whole divine right crock. Who would have thought?

Nietzsche is in the same line as Machiavelli and other thinkers of that ilk where they basically explain what people ACTUALLY do and in the process tend to shatter egos of people who think they're really being great human beings when they seize power at all costs and lay down an authoritarian hand.

Keynesian economics is a tad bit safer than our current policy (Cut and gash taxes while drastically increasing spending at all times) because it is constantly adjusting to the business climate.

People like this group are the same types of ****-tard idiots who are in the first row of the bookburning bonfire. If you want the mentality of the type of person that would throw Mark Twain off of high school reading lists, change the ending of Romeo and Juliet, and be the first one to burn anything that comes in conflict with their narrow-minded simplistic view on life, look no further than Human Events. Look at the honorable mention list: Darwin? Nadar (you know, the thing where we went off on the auto industry for making unsafe cars)? Freud? Come on.

[Bomby]

Personally, I always thought pop-up books were the most dangerous books out there.

[Legion]

Wait, wait. Are these people meant to represent the right wing of American politics? Are these people meant to trumpet the benefits of right wing policy? All I'm seeing from this website are the sad, self-important, prejudiced, smug, superior ramblings of people who make Margaret Thatcher look liberal by comparison.

Anyone seen their latest news item? A hateful little series of books inspiring religious hatred towards Muslims. And claiming the Crusades were a dfensive action for the Christians. (Hah!) If I was a conservative, I wouldn't want to be associated with this site. Because this sort of regressive bigotted tripe does a great job of overshadowing the actual physical benefits of conservatism, of which there are many, I won't deny.

...Sorry. I really should rant at these people, but I can't be bothered expending the energy of typing an e-mail.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAA-HAHA!.

Haaa...!

[The Missing Link]

Originally posted by Legion's Back:
A hateful little series of books inspiring religious hatred towards Muslims.

The whole idea of that is just bilgewater. Extremism in any direction is just plain baloney.


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[Wyborn]

...somebody tried to change the ending of Romeo and Juliet?