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

Zion · Jun 1, 2005

Can't say i've read any of them.

Conservatives LOL

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 Manifesto 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22

What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20

Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19

On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18

Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18

The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17

Origin of the Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17

Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12

Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11

Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11

Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10

Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10

Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9

Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9

Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9

The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9

The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4

Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591
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Mulder · Jun 1, 2005

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rimbaud · Jun 1, 2005

Wow, there are some really good books in their list (including the honorable mentions).

Is this real? Some of them are obvious/understandable but some are really satirical.

rhadamanthus · Jun 1, 2005

Wow. I hardly even know what to say.

It appears a book that either:

A) Espouses an alternative political system
B) Teaches sexuality as something other than a necessary evil

or

C) Advocates a life without religion

is bad for you.

People with this mindset demonstrate self-imposed ignorance and advocate it as a virtue. Frightening...

Having a convienent belief system that takes all of the complexity out of the world is so comforting that operating outside of that mold is absolutely terrifying for them. When you obtain something like that, you become almost irrational in defending it. That means that secular/opposing ideas must be avoided at all costs..

Rashmon · Jun 1, 2005

On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill

Why does John Stuart Mill hate America? He should be locked up in Gitmo.

rhadamanthus · Jun 1, 2005

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.
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Looking at our current "conservative" government, the irony of a "conservative think tank" lamenting this book's philosophy is so thick it hurts.

thegary · Jun 1, 2005

ima_drummer2k · Jun 1, 2005

rhester · Jun 1, 2005

Books contain ideas

Ideas are the most powerful force behind human behavior

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Hitler, Mao ? I am not surprised by this list.

Let's not run to defend the ideas in the hearts of these men while we scream censorship. Consider carefully their fruits.

Let us acknowledge that good vs. evil if often battled inside the minds of millions who read what they are told and not given a choice. What makes a book good might be better answered knowing what makes a person good.

What does harm mean to those of us who never faced pain and death at the hand of man's cruelty?

RocketMan Tex · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by rhadamanthus
Looking at our current "conservative" government, the irony of a "conservative think tank" lamenting this book's philosophy is so thick it hurts.
Click to expand...

DAMN straight!

rhadamanthus · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by RocketMan Tex
DAMN straight!
Click to expand...

Hey Tex, I look forward to meeting you at Bojangles on the 9th.

langal · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by rhadamanthus
Looking at our current "conservative" government, the irony of a "conservative think tank" lamenting this book's philosophy is so thick it hurts.
Click to expand...

Conservatives and Republicans are not the same thing anymore.

rhadamanthus · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by langal
Conservatives and Republicans are not the same thing anymore.
Click to expand...

Amen!

Thus the quotations.

langal · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by rhester
Books contain ideas

Ideas are the most powerful force behind human behavior

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Hitler, Mao ? I am not surprised by this list.

Let's not run to defend the ideas in the hearts of these men while we scream censorship. Consider carefully their fruits.

Let us acknowledge that good vs. evil if often battled inside the minds of millions who read what they are told and not given a choice. What makes a book good might be better answered knowing what makes a person good.

What does harm mean to those of us who never faced pain and death at the hand of man's cruelty?
Click to expand...

No one here is screaming censorship or book burning. It looks to me that a panel of people were simply asked their opinion.

Liberals would probably consider the Bible or Wealth of Nations the most dangerous book in human history - doesn't mean that they would advocate burning or censoring it.

RocketMan Tex · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by rhadamanthus
Hey Tex, I look forward to meeting you at Bojangles on the 9th.
Click to expand...

HELL YES!!! We'll be throwing down some cold ones!

bnb · Jun 1, 2005

***Deleted****

--- after theGary points out I got our members mixed up .

suddenly, doesn't seem so funny.

(thanks for not quoting my post!).

thegary · Jun 1, 2005

oops!

rhadamanthus · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by RocketMan Tex
HELL YES!!! We'll be throwing down some cold ones!
Click to expand...

The website is down, but I assume that you are the guitar player? (the guy with gray hair? )

thegary · Jun 1, 2005

okay

RocketMan Tex · Jun 1, 2005

Originally posted by rhadamanthus
The website is down, but I assume that you are the guitar player? (the guy with gray hair? )
Click to expand...

Yup, that would be me!

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