Harmful Books and the Wingnuts Who Fear Them

Human Events Online (which is a wingnut site trying to approximate legitimacy by running under a name that sounds vaguely reminiscent of a legitimate outfit likely to be dismissed by the administration as “irrelevant” or “absurd”) has ranked the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. My top two nominations, the Bible and the Qur’an, didn’t make the list for some reason.*

Here’s their Top 10:

The Communist Manifesto
Mein Kampf
Quotations from Chairman Mao
(also known as The Little Red Book)
The Kinsey Report
Democracy and Education
Das Kapital
The Feminine Mystique
The Course of Positive Philosophy
Beyond Good and Evil
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

The best part, however, are the descriptions of each book and why they’re supposedly so harmful. Friedrich Engels is described as the “original limousine leftist,” Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book is noted as having enamored “Western leftists,” Kinsey’s reports “were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy,” author of Democracy and Education John Dewey’s “views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation,” Karl Marx “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,” Betty Friedan “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,” and, perhaps my favorite, in describing Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is it noted that “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.”

Damn you, FDR and our $8 trillion dollar debt! If only he had had the infinite wisdom of responding to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor by invading Mexico based on cooked intelligence and cutting taxes for the rich, none of this would have happened!

Anyway…

The really interesting part comes when you read the entry for Mein Kampf, which is still a widely read text among active radical conservative groups in America today—a point that is strangely absent from the description:
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.
Huh. For a book that registered as #2 on their list, they don’t seem to find many inflammatory things to say about it. I mean, sure, it was popular with Nazis, just like The Communist Manifesto was popular with Communists, but how come Engels gets identified as the ancestor of modern American “liberal elites,” which is a tenuous connection at best, considering that most American liberals aren’t Communists, but Hitler isn’t called “the godfather of the American white supremacy movement,” even though one of the foremost groups dealing in white supremacy are called Neo-Nazis.

Grr. None of this should surprise me from a site that runs Ann Coulter’s column, I guess. Still, it’s just amazing to see the same people who go on about liberal bias in the media (by now, well established as completely fucking imaginary) treat even a booklist with such ridiculous bias. And how scarily indicative of the true extremes of their ideological bent that they don’t really consider Neo-Nazis fair game.

Runners-up that didn’t quite make the Top 10 included: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Descent of Man, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Sigmund Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

You know…basically all the books that if an ignorant, conservative, red state halfwit actually read might turn them into a liberal.

(Hat tip to Nobody’s Business.)

* Before you fire off a nasty comment about how those books aren’t harmful; it’s the people who misread them who are harmful, I’d like to point out that the same could be said for any book, so shut it.

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