Human Events Magazine has gone and done it. They assembled a distinguished and surprisingly diverse group of authors, critics, and intellectuals and listed the 10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. (HT: Citzcom)
...So many books to choose from…so few chosen…
The fact is they could have made it “The Hundred Most Harmful, etc.” and still come up short. And even though they included both Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man in the “Honorable Mention” category – perhaps as a gratuitous slap to contemporary humanists – they actually did a pretty good job. Here are their choices:
1. The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
Or, How to Screw up the World In Five Easy Lessons
2. Mein Kampf by You-Know-Who
The first blogger, Hitler’s incoherent rants became a best seller in Germany only after he came to power and people started to give the book as a wedding gift. Also spawned numerous imitators and a cottage industry in accusatory epithets. (See here for the latest)
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
Little known fact: Even though it’s been referred to by moonbats as The Little Red Book when the Chicoms ran out of red paper, they remade the cover, coloring it with the blood of the Gang of Four (which rapidly ballooned into the Gang of Twenty Million). Unfortunately, they soon ran out of people to execute (figuring that 20 million was just about right) and ended up publishing it in China with an aqua-marine cover with a very nice gold leaf binding.
4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
All your sex belong to us.
5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
Take every crazy idea that’s come up in education over the last 50 years and it will have Dewey’s fingerprints all over it.
6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
More looniness quoted today by loons who think a “dialectic” is some new kind of phone.
7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan
The reason why drop-dead gorgeous women are rarely feminists. One look at Freidan and most of her husky, pimple faced, hairy legged followers who think that sex is rape and good looking babes run for cover. The only mystique involved here is what man could have been so castrated as to marry this bitch?
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
More God is dead stuff from a Frenchman. Two strikes right there.
9. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
God and Superman wasn’t enough for this moonbat, he had to saddle the western world with this incoherent screed against just about everything. Nietzsche was a pest. He was a pill. He was a burr under the saddle of rational thought. And he was Hitler’s fave to boot.
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
We can thank this moonbat for the welfare state.
I’m surprised they didn’t find room in there for Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology which pretty much began the most destructive social movement of the 20th century, Deconstructionism. Although technically a book about literary criticism, Derrida’s followers pounced on his ideas of textual nonsense and turned literary criticism into damaging critiques of western civilization. We’re still trying to recover from that movement’s destruction of the rational left in Europe and to some extent the United States.
Finally, another really harmful book that didn’t make the list and was perhaps the book that had the most influence on Hitler and other Nazi leaders was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the 19th Century in which this befuddled Englishman’s theories on race so captivated the perverts who surrounded Hitler they just couldn’t wait to put them to good use. Hitler himself nearly swooned when Chamberlain told him at their first meeting in 1927 that he would rule Germany one day.
Good thing that one is out of print.
7:39 pm
Looks like some folks at Guantanamo would probably add another book to your little bonfire. Of an earlier vintage, of course.
http://news.yahoo.com/fc/World/Guantanamo_Detainees
8:37 pm
Darwin wrote The Origin Of Species.
8:55 am
“Darwin wrote The Origin Of Species.”
“And even though they included both Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Descent of Man…”
What part of that didn’t you understand?I think you need a remedial reading course.
Also, I would recommend reading each and every book listed here – not putting them on a “bonfire” dingbat.
9:31 am
How about Sartre? Or Rousseau? Or that dumb Bishop Berkley who tried to refute Darwin on religious terms, thus making a serious categorical mistake and enlarging the science/faith chasm…dumb.
Oh yeah…Chomsky. Anything out of the mind of that man…
But when you think about it, if these particular excresences didn’t exist, someone else would’ve written equally bad ideas…gullibility, thy name is half-educated.
10:21 am
O.k. let me rephrase Darwin wrote “The Origin Of Species” not “Origin of the Species” If your going to burn a book at least get the title correct. YOu can take a remedial reading cource if you cannot understand the diference Rick.
10:29 am
You are correct about the title of the book.
I’m just wondering how you get from my statement “I recommend reading each and every book listed” to me advocating book burning?
Please point out in my post where I advocate book burning? You can’t, of course. There isn’t even a hint or a suggestion of it. Only in your warped, ignorant, and confused, hate filled mind is the suggestion made.
Perhaps you’re projecting your own wishes about other books? That’s the only explanation I can think of.
I’m sick of your inane comments. I’m sick of you putting words in my mouth and attributing ideas to me that have no basis in fact.
I’m sick of you. You’re banned.
10:47 am
Chomsky isn’t significant enough; he’s about as dangerous as Erica Jong. I think the best argument for a book that belongs on the list is for “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.
4:37 pm
Rick—
Excellent list. Here are two more candidates:
1. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which was the mainspring of the Seventies’ anti-science movement, and which indirectly led to the banning of DDT in developing nations and thus killing millions.
2. The Koran. I need not elaborate. Though I realize it was first published 1,200 years ago, it just seems so damn dangerous in the hands of people with warped minds.
12:40 am
Hey, judgemc. I think the proprietor of the site asked you to leave. He really doesn’t owe you an explanation. It’s his bandwidth, not yours.
12:21 pm
Judge—
I think you did say something about book burning. But in any case, your honor will be intact if you make yourself scarce from this website.
10:58 am
I think that listing Dewey here is ignorant. It’s been fashionable to bash Dewey for decades. But it seems that when one actually discusses Dewey, it becomes apparent that critics (and proponents) of Dewey usually have read very little (if any) of Dewey’s work. Extreme leftists misuse quotes from Dewey and those on the right are legendary for taking Dewey quotes out of context.