Recommendations from the Book Burners
A panel assembled by the conservative magazine Human Events has come up with a list of the “Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries”. (via MeFi) While the top ten starts off predictably with The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, some of the entries that follow (as well as the runners-up) are so outrageous you’d almost think it was a parody. For example :
The Kinsey Report – Alfred Kinsey The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan Beyond Good and Evil – Freidrich Nietzsche General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money – John Maynard Keynes The Population Bomb – Paul Ehrlich On Liberty – John Stuart Mill Origin of the Species – Charles Darwin Unsafe at Any Speed – Ralph Nader Introduction to Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud The Greening of America – Charles Reich
I’d have a hard time condemning any book as “harmful”, but I can’t imagine a list like this that doesn’t even mention The Turner Diaries or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I’d think that the books most responsible for white-supremacist, militant extremism and the last century of anti-Semitic strife respectively would get at least one nomination, but I guess the guys at Human Events have different ideas about what’s considered “harmful”.
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i particularly like how they sum up the reason that Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ is so dangerous: “The Nazis loved Nietzsche”. Well, they loved him once they had twisted his meanings to match their desires. So i guess the Nazis loved Nietzsche much in the same way that the Christian extremists love the bible.
Comment by holly — June 1, 2005 @ 3:17 pm
Greg, you must have loved this part:
“_General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money_….When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, [Keynes] 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.”
Comment by dAnimal — June 1, 2005 @ 3:19 pm
Oh, no wonder there’s so much anti-sex and anti-woman stuff in there–Phyllis Schlafly was one of the judges!
Comment by dAnimal — June 1, 2005 @ 3:32 pm
Damn! I’ve only read 4 of those books… i feel like such a loser. i’m headin gover to amazon right now!
Comment by tomN! — June 1, 2005 @ 3:52 pm
These cons should remember their own gun-toting NRA bumper-sticker credo: Books don’t kill…….ummmm…..well, anybody………I guess if you want to split hairs I suppose a few dozen dropped on someone’s head from an 8th floor window could do some serious damage but otherwise…….? There’s also an outside chance that forced reading of Mein Kampf followed by Das Kapital followed by the Communist Manifesto could quite possibly bore someone to death…. but again much hair splitting. Also, considering that history, at times, reads like one long holy war, why no Bible or Koran? Maybe the Femine Mystique has led to an explosive epidemic of husband abuse that I failed to notice. Oh well, we all know that conservatives know best now don’t we?
Comment by Rich — June 1, 2005 @ 8:47 pm
tomN, Just don’t follow their links when stocking up. While these people find the books oh-so-harmful, they’re not against getting referral credits for each sale.
Comment by manxome — June 2, 2005 @ 5:50 am
I am surprised that none of the Dalai Lama’s books made it into the list.
So, what these people are say with their list is, “you should not have any other influence in your thinking other than what we think you should read.”
I could never understand the Christian philosophy that women should be more or less bare foot and pregnant at home.
I was stopped in a parking lot at my local Target by a woman who actually BLOCKED in my car so I could not pull out of my parking space and handed me 3 cheap Christian magazines. One had a list of what young women should do in situations with boys. One said that “you should not start a relationship, let the man do it first.” Ha…cute
Comment by Kryten Syxx — June 2, 2005 @ 5:57 am
Books they disapprove of: Ones that could inspire free thought.
I can’t wait until they release their recommended list with eight Ronald Reagan bios (with scriptures by Reagan in red).
Comment by Dr. Pants — June 2, 2005 @ 7:59 am
I’m surprised they don’t want to ban ANY book that is not obvious propaganda. Frankly I would imagine that any book that makes you think at all would ultimately present a danger to these folks who thrive on ignorance and disempowerment.
Personally, I’d like to see the list for all time, not just the 19th and 20th Centuries, and I’d hope that they’d put The Bible at the top of the list as most dangerous book ever – not specifically for what it says, but for what folks have done as a result of it for going on 2000 years now.
Comment by Rudicus — June 2, 2005 @ 8:36 am
the one thing that gets me… no wait, the whole thing… but one thing that really bugs me is that the Communist Manifesto ranks higher than Mein Kampf!?!?!? I know that the conservatives think that Communism is the greatest threat to their capitalist utopia, but Mein Kampf is the book of a madman who slaughtered millions of people. Karl Marx never slaughtered anyone.
Comment by tomN! — June 2, 2005 @ 9:38 am
I wonder if they realize that some of us read some of those books, and rejected many of the ideas as crackpot or dangerous. So they might not be dangerous in and of themselves ( the Books don’t kill..people do meme ). The point of it all is I suppose that these books were BAD for humanity, but the movements associated with them were reactionary movements against extremes, first on the far far right, then the left. This leaves a huge gap in the narrative, as Cons are prone to do: how to you deal with and correct social injustice without becoming reactionary. My presumption is they didn’t want to deal with that, what with their tiny brains might exploding.
Comment by muted — June 2, 2005 @ 10:40 am
It amazes me that how every time some list like this forms they criticize a book by Darwin that does not exist. There is no _Origin of THE Species_ rather there is an _Origin of Species_. This is not an entirely subtle distinction. These conservative pundits, having never read Darwin, assume that this is a book of the origin of mankind. When it is in fact an attempt to explain the massive diversifications of species through the theory of natural selection (the full title being _On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life). I think this is very telling that these people have a concept of “The Species” like some “great chain of being” that leads up to perfection incarnate – the human male. In fact Darwin knew how controversial his findings were and primarily limited the discussions in this book to “lower” species only alluding to the origins of mankind. These allusions created a firestorm in his time that has continued to blaze ever since even though the primary tenets of natural selection are universally accepted in the scientific community. I suppose when a theory both knocks us off our superior species pedestal and also explains how humans could arise in a godless universe, it is going to be seen as dangerous to our values, our youth, our freedom, our democracy, and Amyrhhica. Thank you good night and God bless.
Comment by Joshua — June 2, 2005 @ 8:16 pm
One of the most amusing things about the article discussed here is that, for each of these allegedly harmful and corrosive books, Human Events Online has helpfully provided a link to the Amazon.com “buy me” page for the book in question. No doubt the site is an Amazon affiliate and gets a few dimes every time they refer a sale to Amazon. Sure, these books are the “most harmful of the past two centuries” — but hey, why not make some money off of them!
Comment by Stewart — June 5, 2005 @ 5:12 am