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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

Just so you don't harm yourself or your children, be sure you don't read or
have any of these books around.  Doncha know the experts said they are
harmful!

Lynda
>
> Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
> May 31, 2005
>
> 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 called 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 put 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 at 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 profession 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.
> [The Nazis banned unabridged editions of Nietzsche's books
> because you had to wrench phrases out of context to
> misinterpret them to support Nazism. Nietzsche hated statism
> and anti-Semitism.]
>
> 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 midst 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
> (oh, like that isn't a telling entry)
>
> 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 Civilization
> 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
>
>
> Those who control the past, control the future; Those who control the
future, control the present; Those who control the present, control the
past.^