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

From: dlaibman@JJAY.CUNY.EDU
Date: Thu Jun 02 2005 - 17:51:15 EDT


I have just one question.

How come there are no books by OPE members on this list.  We must be
slipping!!!

David (Laibman)


----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Cockshott <wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK>
Date: Thursday, June 2, 2005 5:29 pm
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th
Centuries
> 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
> policyleaders 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
> godfathersof 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Beer Hall Putsch&rdquo; 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
> murderof Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against
> Russia to carve
> out &ldquo;lebensraum&rdquo; (&ldquo;living room&rdquo;) 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&rsquo;s Republic of China,
> enslaving the world&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Cultural
> Revolution&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;It is the task of the people of the whole
> worldto pu! t an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by
> imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,&rdquo; wrote Mao.
>
> 4.  The Kinsey Report   Author : Alfred Kinsey  Publication date :
> 1948Score : 37  Summary : Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana
> Universitywho, 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.
> &ldquo;Kinsey&rsquo;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,&rdquo;the Washington  Times  reported last year when a movie
> on Kinsey was
> released. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
>
> 5.  Democracy and Education       Author : John Dewey  Publication
> date :
> 1916  Score : 36  Summary : John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until
> 1952,was a &ldquo;progressive&rdquo; philosopher and leading
> advocate for
> secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of
> Chicagoand at Columbia. He signed the  Humanist Manifesto  and
> rejectedtraditional 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
> &ldquo;skills&rdquo;instead. His views had great influence on the
> direction of American
> education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the
> Clintongeneration.
>
> 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&rsquo;s materialistic
> theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the
> development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and
> amorallyexploit 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
> &ldquo;a comfortable  concentration camp&rdquo;--a role that degraded
> women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became
> foundingpresident 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 &ldquo;Friedan was from her college
> days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political
> intimateof the leaders of America&rsquo;s Cold War fifth column
> and for a time
> even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb
> projects in Berkeley&rsquo;s radiation lab with J. Robert
> Oppenheimer.&rdquo;    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, &ldquo;I have naturally ceased to believe in God.&rdquo;
> Later, in the six volumes of   The Course of Positive Philosophy
> , he
> coined the term &ldquo;sociology.&rdquo; He did so while
> theorizing that
> the human mind had developed beyond &ldquo;theology&rdquo; (a belief
> that there is a God who governs the universe), through
> &ldquo;metaphysics&rdquo; (in this case defined as the French
> revolutionaries&rsquo; reliance on abstract assertions of
> &ldquo;rights&rdquo; without a God), to &ldquo;positivism,&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;&lsquo;God is dead&rsquo;--Nietzsche&rdquo;
> followedby &ldquo;&lsquo;Nietzsche is dead&rsquo;--God.&rdquo;
> Nietzsche&rsquo;sprof!
> ession that &ldquo;God is dead&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Will to Power,&rdquo; 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
> helpthem dominate the world around them. &ldquo;Life itself is
> essentiallyappropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and
> weaker,suppression, severity, imposition of one&rsquo;s own forms,
> incorporationand, at the least and mildest, exploitation,&rdquo;
> 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
> leadersserved as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.
> Arnold
> Beichman  Research Fellow Hoover Institution   Prof. Brad Birzer
> Hillsdale College   Harry Crocker  Vice President &amp; Executive
> EditorRegnery 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
>
> -----------
> Read more articles like this at HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE!
> http://www.humaneventsonline.com/
>
>
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