Conservatives' Hit List:
Top Ten "Most Harmful" Books
Truly heavy sigh.
From Human Events...
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.
The Fascist Fundie Judges:
Arnold Beichman
Research Fellow
Hoover Institution
Prof. Brad Birzer
Hillsdale College
Harry Crocker
Vice President & Executive Editor
Regnery Publishing, Inc.
Prof. Marshall DeRosa
Florida Atlantic University
Dr. Don Devine
Second Vice Chairman
American Conservative Union
Prof. Robert George
Princeton University
Prof. Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College
Prof. William Anthony Hay
Mississippi State University
Herb London
President
Hudson Institute
Prof. Mark Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College
Douglas Minson
Associate Rector
The Witherspoon Fellowships
Prof. Mark Molesky
Seton Hall University
Prof. Stephen Presser
Northwestern University
Phyllis Schlafly
President
Eagle Forum
Fred Smith
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Scary Honorable Mention "Most Harmful" Books:
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
Creepy Conservatives' Top Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
The people who believe that these books are harmful (fascist fundie trans. DANGEROUS) control America's school boards, city councils, Chambers of Commerce, elections boards, state legislatures, national congressional districts, the US Senate, the US Supreme Court, and the White House.
What's scarier?
A bunch of books or the people who don't want you to read them?
Book paper burns at what temperature?
posted by delilahboyd at 8:21 AM
1 Comments:
Hi,
I don't really understand your comment. The people compiling the list control nothing and recommmend nothing. Why do you say they want to ban something, in the sense say that Holocaust denial is banned in most of Europe?
So far as I can tell, everyone seems to agree that ideas, and presentations of ideas, can lead to bad effects and therefore can be dangerous. Some people say it's The Bell Curve that's dangerous, others that it's the Kinsey Report or whatever. One can argue about who's right, but the basic point that it's possible for ways of understanding things to be dangerous, doesn't seem that controversial. After all, why would ideas be so important if they didn't have big effects?
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