Ten most harmful books
Human Events asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help them compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and got this:
1. Communist Manifesto 2. Mein Kampf 3. Quotations from Chairman Mao 4. The Kinsey Report 5. Dewey’s Democracy and Education 6. Das Kapital 7. The Feminine Mystique 8. Comte’s The Course of Positive Philosophy (Comte coined ‘sociology’) 9. Nietszche’s Beyond Good and Evil 10. Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
Nice to know they hate women as much as they detest Commies, sex, educationists, and monetarists. Who don't they hate? This list doesn't say much for our conservative brethern. Fuck me with a swastika conjoined with a hammer and sickle: at least five of these books have advanced the human project considerably.
posted by Adam @ 6:40 AM
2 Comments:
What a bunch of pompus windbags.
This biased censorship party bothered me so much that instead of just leaving a comment, I linked to it on my blog, and e-mailed the old coots.
Yeah, I think I'm pretty much with y'all on this one. The choices are very safe, for one thing, very what's expected... Like Mein Kampf... You'd think a think-tank could have come up with something more original. And, obviously, they've picked books that contradict their narrow world view, which I suppose most of us would do.
What's really disappointing about it, though, is that they didn't explain why these books are harmful. Yeah, Mein Kampf was written by a guy who got medieval on Europe's ass. Does that make the book harmful? By their own admission, no one even paid any attention to it until after Hitler got started. So what did the book itself achieve? I'd think Hitler's later work of publicizing his ideas had a lot more to do with it than a book that didn't sell until after the fact.
That's the thing with think-tanks. They're picked to say what the organizer wants them to say.
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