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.