Book burning keeps you warm.

[catsidhe]

An online Right-wing magazine called Human Events Online has released their top ten most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The top ten are

1. The Communist Manifesto: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, 1848.
   OK, with you so far.
2. Mein Kampf: Adolf Hitler, 1925-26.
   Yep, no arguments here.
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao: Mao Zedong, 1966.
   Yeah, alright, although I think it is not so much what was said as the circumstances which made it such a widespread piece of turgid agit-prop...
4. The Kinsey Report: Alfred Kinsey, 1948.
   Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over? Where did this come from? How do they justify it?

   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.”

   Ah, so only sex between a husband and his wife, in missionary position, him on top is permissible, and the recognition that people like to do other things with their bits is directly comparable to the Cultural Revolution or the Third Reich. I see. Let's continue:
5. Democracy and Education: John Dewey, 1916.
   I have never heard of this book, or its author. Must be pretty bad, though. What do they say?

   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.

   Ooooh-kay. So, secular humanism and critical thought are up there with Communism as most harmful evils of our time. Notice the so-subtle dig at Clinton. He was, of course, the Worst President Ever, and that is something which doesn't even need to be explained, because it is so self-evidently true. Notice also 'progressive' in scare quotes. Had enough, yet?:
6. Das Kapital: Karl Marx, 1867-1894.
   Ummm, right. I'll let this one pass. It's not entirely his fault he forgot to account for human nature in his Magnum Opus, although that omission does kinda invalidate most of what he said. Onward and Upward:
7. The Feminine Mystique: Betty Friedan, 1963.

   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.”

   Barefoot and pregnant, dammit! The very concept of feminism is anathema. Why, next you'll be suggesting that they be allowed to vote and own property! Worse, the author was ... *gasp* ... Communist! No Communist has ever been correct about anything!
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy: Auguste Comte, 1830-1842.
   Their main objection to this seems to be the rejection of the need for God.
9. Beyond Good and Evil: Freidrich Nietzsche, 1886.
   Similar for this one.

   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.

   Wow. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Nietzsche was saying. Posit that there is no God, and that we have moved beyond the point where the fear of God keeps us in line. What then? Well, Nietzsche described one possible path, but that path did not include the wholesale slaughter of averyone who didn't agree with it. It was about personally developing ones moral system beyond that of the fear of punishment, and taking personal responsibility for ones own actions, and their consequences. These guys show precisely the same misunderstanding of Nietzsche's work as the Nazis did. (And, for the record, Nietzsche would have despised the Nazis, as they abnegated the possibility of personal choice.)
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: John Maynard Keynes, 1936.

    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.

    Umm, pardon me if I'm mistaken, but wasn't most of that debt run up under the aegis of George W. Bush? I can't help getting the impression that this is not dangerous because of what it says, but because Democrats like to quote from it.

Here is a list of those books which didn't quite make the cut. I can't make this up.

• The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
• What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
• Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
• On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
• Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
• Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
• The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
• Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
• Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
• Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
• Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
• Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
• Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
• Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
• The Greening of America by Charles Reich
• The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
• Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

What the Hell? Ralph Nader? Sigmund Freud?? Charles Darwin???

Will someone please explain why these people are allowed to walk in civilised society without putting down their crack pipes first?

And it's not even that I've never heard of many of these (and I'm not entirely ignorant. I would have expected to at least heard of these 'dangerous' books), it's the ommissions. Where, for example, is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
Oh, apparantly only the Left can be anti-Semitic. Disliking the actions of Israel is far more extreme than the tacit approval of the single document most responsible for the deaths of millions of people.


feh.

Comments

[lokicarbis.livejournal.com]

Where, for example, is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Ooh, good one. You want to point at stuff that inspired the Nazis, then the Protocols should probably be ahead of Mein Kampf, and definitely ahead of Nietzsche.

Not to mention that the two most dangerous books of all time, both to those who read them and to those who are merely unlucky enough to be caught in the blast radius, are the Bible and the Koran.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Actually, its the 'ten most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th centuries'.

I'll edit my text to remedy that.

I can't help wondering if the 19/20C thing was chosen to deliberately exclude the Bible and Qu'ran. Without that restriction, though, they should both be up the top of the list.

[lokicarbis.livejournal.com]

I wondered that myself. And I can't help thinking that if they'd gone back just one more century, we'd see Voltaire, and possibly Tom Paine, on the list too. Actually, given the apparent prudishness of these people, we'd probably just see de Sade.

[baralier.livejournal.com]

What? No Harry Potter?

They're obviously not trying hard enough.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I once had the joy of overhearing some people in Borders. They had gone directly to the table covered in HP tat, and one of them picked up The Philosopher's Stone. The conversation was then along the lines of
See? 'Witchcraft and Wizardry,' says so right there. Witchcraft. I told you.
Maybe it's, like, a metaphor?
No, look, see this guy on the cover: Dumb-bell-door. He's a sorcerer. I told you, it's all teaching the occult. They're turning children into witches...
usw. I exerted great restraint, that day.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

And, for the record, Nietzsche would have despised the Nazis, as they abnegated the possibility of personal choice.

I disagree. Nietzsche was a racists and utterly opposed to democracy. I rather suspect he would have been thrilled at the aesthetic glory that was Nazism.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Nietzsche was racist, but I suspect on the same level as Sam Vimes in the Discworld: he was racist, but hated all races equally, so it evens out.

Nietzsche's philosophy was about personal choice and responsibility being more important than what he saw as outmoded morals based on fear and guilt. He called them the Master and Slave mentalities. His Übermensch was one who had rejected the fear of punishment, and the guilt caused by the internalised fear of same, for personal choice. He could choose to do things which others would call evil, but if he knew what the consequences would be, had made the conscious and deliberate choice to do so, and was prepared to live with the consequences, then Nietzsche held that he had put himself outside good and evil as most people understand them, and was capable of feats which those bound by the Slave mentality were not. In such a system, there would be Übermenschen and Untermenschen (or Masters and Slaves), only insofar as the Untermenschen choose to remain subservient. For such a person, who chooses to sit and take what is given, Nietzsche held contempt.

Nazism, on the other hand, was not simply a group of Übermenschen taking what was theirs, it was the explicit setting up of a new religion, where the Nazis would tell the Germans (and ideally, everyone) what to think. Nietzsche loathed this concept, and his books were in large part talking about how conventional morality, as exemplified by religions generally, was a power construct which actively harmed human development. As the Nazi choice was 'do what we say, or we'll kill you and your entire family', it removed the possibility of human choice, and forced everyone into the rôle of Untermensch, 'Will to Power' notwithstanding.

He despised democracy because it gives a voice to Untermenschen which he felt is not deserved.


This is not to say that I agree with Nietzsche's philosophy (as Nietzsche extended the argument to include that the Übermensch has the right and duty to destroy those who get in his way, and that anyone who the Übermensch destroyed was therefore an Untermensch by definition), but both the Nazi's and these nutjobs have misrepresented him.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I disagree that Nietzsche hated all races equally. For starters, he glorified the ancient Greeks, and even mused on the possibility that Socrate's legendary ugliness was due to the fact that he was not "pure" Greek.

OTOH his antisemitism switched back and forth. At one stage he described anti-Semitism to be as foolish as being anti-French, anti-Polish etc. Shortly afterwards he called for a ban on further immigration of Jews to Germany. He then goes on to describe the Jews as the strongest, toughest and purest of all races in Europe but calls for an end to "cross breeding" betwene Jews and Germans.

I'll also degree on your analysis of Nietzche and Nazism, because unlike the authoritarian Christians who subsumed their will into a Holy Book, the Nazi elite were acting entirely of their own violition.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I'll also degree on your analysis of Nietzche and Nazism, because unlike the authoritarian Christians who subsumed their will into a Holy Book, the Nazi elite were acting entirely of their own violition.
It took me some time to think of my response to this. I still think you're wrong here, because the only one who was free to do as he wished, on his own authority, was Hitler himself. The others drew their authority more or less from him, and subsumed themselves into the Nazi Party. They did what they wished, but under the aegis of the Party, not under their own sovereign authority.

There were Übermenschen in Nazi Germany, but they were either Hitler, or the next I can think of were the bomb plotters, who tried to blow him up, but even then they don't quite qualify because they were doing it for conventially moral reasons, not merely because Hitler was in their way.

Obviously, though, I'm going to have to read Nietzsche again, and more closely.