Nefarious Thought Criminals, All
Conservative websites must love liberal blogs – we send them so much traffic. Like today. Today, there’s a lot of talk about Human Events Online and their list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books” as determined by a panel of 15 “conservative scholars and public policy leaders” (a list that includes no less a dignitary than Phyllis Schlafly). It’s no surprise that Mein Kampf made the list – although it has been noted that apparently it is less harmful than The Communist Manifesto. And, as we know, when playing the spin game there are no coincidences.
The list is meaningless, and not in the “I’m a liberal and therefore think this is meaningless” sense, but in the sense of, Human Events doesn’t actually have a list. It’s pointless. The purpose of this article was, in a subtle but influential way, to emphasize the growing right-wing theme that Communism surpasses Nazism as the greatest evil of all time.
A quick scan of the list, by the way, shows that while the list covers the 19th and 20th centuries, of the four books listed from the 19th two are by the same author – Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital both make the list. The other two 19th century contendors are Comte’s The Course of Positive Philosophy and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil, both apparently for challenging traditional Christian ideas of “values,” although the panel also appears to take issue with Comte’s anti-Royalist stance.
The implication is that the list of 10 “harmful” books is a reading list for the liberal agenda. This is, of course, ridiculous. If we liberals could put aside our differences long enough to compile a reading list, we would be able to agree on who we actually want for a candidate. We would be able to put together more than Air America, which for all of its seeming popularity is still a David to conservative talk radio’s Goliath. And we would probably have the White House instead of having spent the past election arguing among all of our various splinter groups over who was really worth supporting. In the list of ten, it’s more than likely that every liberal would find at least one book they had no interest in, and many liberals would probably be able to up the list to four or five rejected titles.
The list serves more as an interesting peek into the conservative agenda. Conservatives, apparently, are organized enough to generate not only a reading list, but a list of books to be burned first as soon as they can shut the liberals up about that whole “freedom of the press” thing.
In addition to Mein Kampf and the seminal works of socialism, the list is a hodgepodge of ideas that the extreme right wing finds troubling. There’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which Human Events Online blames for the “normalization of promiscuity and deviancy.” There’s Betty Friedon’s The Feminine Mystique, which is blamed for telling women that they didn’t have to stay at home and change diapers if they wanted to actually have a professional life (this produces a personal favorite quote from HEO’s article, “Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism”). Even John Dewey is roundly condemned for his work Democracy and Education, because Dewey dared to state that teaching children to think was more important than teaching them traditional values.
Most telling, however, is their attack on the book that rounds out the list – John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Anybody who watched the Republican convention this past election (as I did) will remember how speaker after speaker praised FDR, talked of his legacy, and generally tried to claim the avid New-Dealist as one of their own. Alas, how fickle the Republican party is.
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.
And just as easily as that, the fact that we had a budget surplus under Clinton is erased from the public mind and FDR carries the blame for Bush’s failed economic agenda.
Of course, with the conservatives increasingly depending on a weakened investigative media and a general poo-pooing of intellectualism, it’s a sure bet that few people who read the list will ever read even a single one of these books for themselves to form their own opinions.
Did you notice that every title on HEO’s original article is actually an Amazon affiliate link? Two can play at that game. Let’s put some capitalism in play, shall we? Have a handful o’ affiliate links and go crazy! You’ll want to buy every single one of these – it’s the American way! And I promise that from this list, Human Events Online won’t see a dime!
Your Reading List (thanks, Amazon.com!)
- The Communist Manifesto (also available for free from Project Gutenberg, if you wanna be a filthy commie hippie about it)
- Mein Kampf (How many liberals would actually have this on their reading list? Beuller?)
- Quotations of Chairman Mao (Human Events Online links to a “little red book” that’s actually little and red, but this edition is annotated! Now, that’s what I call service!)
- Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Eh, what the heck. Here’s Kinsey, too. Knock yerself out.
- Democracy and Education (also available from Gutenberg, those leftist bastards!)
- Das Kapital
- The Feminine Mystique
- Introduction to Positive Philosophy
- Beyond Good and Evil (oh, Gutenberg, does your anti-capitalism know no bounds?)
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
And, in the interest of fairness, you can also buy Bush’s favorite book.
Has it occurred to anybody that the list of the ten most harmful books also doubles as a list that Bush can never even hope to read?
And also that for an anti-elitist group, these Republicans sure seem to know some egg-headed stuff? Heck – most liberals have probably never even heard of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, let alone read it.
June 2nd, 2005 at 3:45 pm
I’m sorry, but how can I take seriously any list of “most harmful books” that doesn’t include the likes Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity?
And where, exactly, does My Pet Goat figure into all of this?