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  • From: "Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] The "Book Burners" Are Out in Force Again
  • Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 09:33:44 -0700

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.^






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