Re: [OPE-L] Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Thu Jun 02 2005 - 17:29:46 EDT


I note that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not make it

-----Original Message-----
From: OPE-L on behalf of glevy@PRATT.EDU
Sent: Thu 6/2/2005 1:58 PM
To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Subject: [OPE-L] Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
 
I saw the link to this article in the PEN-L archives.  This story
was published in the reactionary magazine, HUMAN EVENTS. The voting
was done by a 'distinguished' panel of conservatives (listed at end
of article).

Summary:

1.  _The Communist Manifesto_
2. _Mein Kampf_
3. _Quotations from Chairman Mao_
4. _The Kinsey Report_
5. _Democracy and Education_ by John Dewey
6. _Das Kapital_
7. _The Feminine Mystique_ by Betty Friedan
8. _The Course of Positive Philosophy_ by Auguste Comte
9. _Beyond Good and Evil_ by Freidrich Nietzsche
10. _The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money_

There is also a listing of books getting an 'Honorable Mention'
near the end of the article.

Any surprises here?

In solidarity, Jerry



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


 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
calle! d 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.

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.

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 pu! t an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by
imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

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 a! t 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.”

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.

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.

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.”    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.

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
prof!
 ession 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.

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 mid!
 st 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.

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 Civi
lization   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     The Judges   These 15 scholars and public policy leaders
served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.    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

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http://www.humaneventsonline.com/


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