[Phys-L] Re: HUMAN EVENTS Article: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries - PART 2a

[rrhake at EARTHLINK.NET (Richard Hake)]

PART 2a
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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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CONTINUED IN PART 2b