So...I was researching Silent Spring last night, (I had a report on the significance of Environmentalists) and I was shocked to see that it made Honorable Mention on Human Events' "Top 10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th & 20th Centuries." Well, I shouldn't say shocked. I hadn't expected it, but I wasn't surprised. After all, Human Events has been proud of its bleeding edge conservatism since 1944. As a self-proclaimed bibliophile, I was immensly curious about this list (not to mention perturbed that yet another one had been drawn up). So, I followed wikipedia's link:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=7591
This list was so biased I didn't even know what to think. Each book was rated by 15 different judges on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the least harmful, and 10 being the most harmful. In first place, with 74 points, was Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto. I wasn't surprised. Second on the list, with a mere 41 points (that's right folks, 33 points behind our Commie propaganda) was Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Granted, Mein Kampf was ignored until Hitler came into power, when possession of a copy became a requirement for marriage in Germany, but still...41 points?!
Also featured on this list of subversive texts was John Dewey's Democracy and Education (in which Dewey explains that rote memorization is an ineffective way of teaching and that children need to be taught how to think), Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (The Kinsey Report) (in which Kinsey explained that American men are considerably more promiscuous and "sexually wild" than was public), and Betty Freidan's The Feminie Mystique (the book that sparked the feminist movement in the 1970s.) Understandable...all understandable. I disagree, but I could see how these are all justifiable picks.
However...
The summaries provided of each of these books are not summaries. They are espousings of political beliefs, miniture political rants against the books. Human Events did not merely summarize each book, they damned each book to the eternal fires of hell for varying reasons, with varying validity. A few excerpts:
"In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, [John Dewey] 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."
God forbid...the Clinton generation.
"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.”
I don't beleive Betty Freidan ever actually denied women the right to be stay-at-home mothers. I think she was going more for "let the ones who want to get out kitchen/bedroom out." Also...this list was published in 2005..........It hasn't been ok to justify hating something/someone for being communist since 1991, when the USSR fell (ok...except Castro, Americans hate on Castro). And yet, Freidan's book is bad because she dated a Communist?!
"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."
No...they weren't.
" 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."
Which the war in Iraq has already increased by how much again?
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Aren't books put on that list due to them having different thoughts than the mass thought of the government or higher society? I find it intresting that we find the Communist Maniefsto dangerous enough that we have to in a way control people not to read it by placing it on this list... kinda of hypocritical don't you think?
-Prosperity begins with Diversity
They just wish they didn't have to give up all of their money to be an all powerful state. Take the economics out and cons will be crowing for some of that authoritarian power.
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto embodies the political ideology that has killed more than 100 million innocents. The Tianamen Square incident for example. Communism has killed more innocents than all the religious wars in history combined.
Alfrend Kinsey's research has been exposed as fraudulent.
Karl Marx's manifesto was his idea of *perfect* communism. He was expressing communism as it should be ideally, not taking in to account at the time that people are corrupt and would take advantage of such a system. Marx and his colleagues can hardly be blamed for Tiananmen Square--The government can though. China and the Soviet Union’s government should be blamed, not the man who was trying to solve problems with monopolies.
It may be that Communism does not work when combined with human nature. But that is exactly why we say "Communism only works in two places: Heaven, where they do not need it, and Hell, where they already have it". Whether or not Karl Marx should be blamed for the atrocities that Communism has caused is a separate question and does not change the fact that the ideology is deadly.
And how many people has the pursuit of democracy killed?
You simply can't blame the atrocities that come as results of people manipulating ideologies to their own end on the ideology.
If you do that, you may just have to ban The Bible, and its supposed author, God himself. Just look at how many people died because of Christianity? The Crusade, the Spanish inquisition, even the Holocaust (in a way) wouldn't have existed without Christianity. Now is that fair?
~*Visit me at http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/sweetvoiceofharmony *~
If by fraudulent, you mean Kinsey's samples were biased. Kinsey wasn't a statistician, so he wasn't aware of how to properly frame his samples in an experiment. Of course, you have to think of biased in statistics terms, which you probably can't. Let's just say that it doesn't mean he intentionally swayed his study in favor of a particular result. The Kinsey Report's real value was in making sex a subject that was okay to study and discuss, as well as showing what kind of sexual behavior was common in American society.
Common sense is as rare as genius. ~Emerson
Relax. Put down the gloves, eh? I'm just saying what I've read. I've studied my statistics so I know all about that. But I wasn't talking about that. I've read some horror stories about the guy and his 'studies'. Child molestation and whatnot. Take for example the 10% stat. Kinsey proposed that roughly ten per cent of men are homosexual based on a study he did. He studied men who had been in prison if they had participated in 'homosexual acts' and used that as representative of all men in general. Any educated person knows that is intellectually dishonest.
In all honesty putting the books on a list that says they are harmful for me will in a way drive me to read them. I'm not saying this list will drive me to desire America to become Communist or that I will want to follow Hitler's blue print for taking over the government inside Mein Kampf, but These books are history and history is fascinating and the next time I need a good book to read I will consider one from this list.
Where documents by important scientists, and, surprisingly, Utopia were made illegal. If you had any of those books, then you were automatically excommunicated.
But, really, it's just reinforcing the five year old in all of us. "Harmful books" is just a way of metaphorically telling a little kid "don't touch the stove"! Not that I think these books would "burn" you. Just that it's instinct.
It does not say that the books are banned, only that they are harmful. Which, I suppose, means that the ideas contained within them, when followed, caused a great deal of harm to people.
You might be surprised how many books have been banned in the past, for whatever reason. Authors range from Mark Twain to Adolph Hitler, from Thomas Paine to Maya Angelou.
Here are just a few books that have been banned in the past:
Doctor Zhivago, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Wealth of Nations, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Communist Manifesto, Civil Disobedience, The Bible, Animal Farm, The Age of Reason, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mein Kampf, 1984, Rights of Man, and Ulysses.
Come on, you're going to ban Uncle Tom's Cabin???
Allison Parker
little red riding hood and robin hood and his merry men too
My list would start off like this:
1. The Old Testament
2. The Koran
3. The Origin of Species (if you have the communist manifesto on the list, then this should be too)
4. The Malleus Maleficarum
5. Mein Kampf
really? any particular reason?
Interesting. What about The Turner Diaries? The Malleus Maleficarum (although that wasn't written in the 19th or 20th Century) or The Anarchist Cookbook?
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
"May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the warm rays of the sun fall upon your home."
I don't think any books can actually be harmful. It all depends on how open of a mind you have when you read them and what you then chose to do with the information you've just absorbed. Sometimes we need to learn about things that are preposterous to us or controversial just so we can better ourselves.
VERONICA!
The idea of a harmful book is that the contents are harmful. For example, the Communist Manifesto is harmful because it promotes Communism, which has to take some blame for the USSR and China and Cambodia etc. And Mien Kampf obviously has its problems. However, even if you accept that ideas in some of those books are harmful and most, such as teaching children to think, are not, the suppression of ideas is one of the most dangerous concepts that exist, whether you are doing it through suggestion or force.
No mention Silent Spring, which the post was originally about. No doubt folks will stick up for Carson who's responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa. Can the Bible and the Crusades claim the same?
Obviously not.
actually...the Bible and the crusades can claim the same...and worse.
also, Carson's reasons for eliminating the use of DDT actually also had to do with malaria. By the book's writing, DDT had stopped being effective against malaria-bearing mosquitos. The pesticide was useless because the mosquitos had adapted to it. That's the actual reason DDT use was banned.
You think the government actually cares two hoots about bald eagles?