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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