Best worst sausage, I mean books
Human Events asked a panelist of fifteen conservative scholars and public policy leaders to generate a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Here's what they came up with:
1. The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
2. Mein Kampf - Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao - Mao
4. The Kinsey Report - Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education - Dewey
6. Das Kapital - Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique - Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy - Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - Keynes
Overall, I think it's a pretty good list. I'm not too sure about Hitler and Mao as numbers 2 and 3, though. Both their books were relatively obscure until their regimes actually came to power, at which point they were heavily circulated. So I would say their causal power was limited. However, I have to especially agree with the inclusion of Dewey on the list. He butchered the notion of an objective education, instead replacing it with the "knowledge is experience" crap we are left with in today's public schooling.
Of course there are objections, as there should be with any "best-of" list, but the jackasses over here need to get a clue. They assert that "books don't harm people; people harm people." Ah yes. How could I forget, the world is full of psychotics whose ideas spontaneously materialize in their minds. Communism as inspired by Marx and Engels wasn't responsible for the deaths of millions or anything. Seriously, it's mindblowing to see how deconstructionist some people get, just to defend things that were obviously harmful. Ideas have consequences, it's pretty cut and dry.
Anyway, chime in with your thoughts on the list (and the honorable mentions). That is, unless you're a pinko, in which case we will go Crucible on your ass.
3 Comments:
It sucks that some of these books were so destructive because of the way people manipulated their content. As for an honorable mention, I'd say Roget's 1989 Thesaurus was pretty harmful, but that's mainly because of the thesaurus fights we had before the teacher arrived in middle school English classes. Ahh, the bruises they could make....
Power of Positive Thinking
is a load of newage bullshit walking the line between scientology and monotheism setting the basis for Americans obsession with self esteem and prozac dependency.
Sounds like a winner to me
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