The Ten most Harmfull Books of the past 200 Years

[B~E]

Yay for title with random capital letters.

Anyway, Human Events Online picks out, in their view, the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591

List :

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.

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.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao

uthor: 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

=========

Of course, this list is to be taken with care. Afterall, it is the view from the religious conservative of america. The idea of such a list is great, but to see that it was done with such an undexterous bias is sad, really. The communist manifesto was brilliant, but its how it was applied that was desatrous. As for their view on sexual liberation and feminism, I guess they are entitled to their opinions, even if they are wrong.

[Algazaleen!]

Knoledge is a gift to be cherished and never destroyed. Not even Mein Kamf should be destroyed from history, or else it will be forgotten and happen again. So I guess that what I am trying to say is that there are no harmful books, only harmful people.

[Ntrik_]

I dont think those books are really harmful to us at all, rather, they teach about people's misdoings, going against morals and such (killing millions of Jews, people, etc), and these teach us the knowledge about Human history and such..

[Bret]

Originally Posted by Algazaleen!

Knoledge is a gift to be cherished and never destroyed. Not even Mein Kamf should be destroyed from history, or else it will be forgotten and happen again. So I guess that what I am trying to say is that there are no harmful books, only harmful people.

Books don't hurt people; people hurt people.

[B~E]

Originally Posted by Cappy

Books don't hurt people; people hurt people.

Indeed, this is a wise saying. It can be applied to religion, or guns, or light drugs like marijuana. They dont do arm, its the people, its mankind, who's not using it wisely.

Our nature is to blame in most case, not some stupid book.

[Tipsy]

I really don't think these books are harmful. What the world needs and has always needed are critical thinkers. Whether they are right or wrong, these people are trying to get their ideas out there. In most of these people's opinions, they are trying to accomplish some sort of goal. Some of these might be greed; others may be just trying to make the world a better place. The proclaimed most harmful book of the last two hundred years is the communist manifesto, but it was merely written by two people trying to create a better world. Their idea was taken and made into the "Evil Empire of the Soviet Union", though it is obvious this is not what they had intended.

On a side note, books do hurt me… damn paper cuts.

[AZN_FLEA]

Originally Posted by Black~Enthusiasm

Indeed, this is a wise saying. It can be applied to religion, or guns, or light drugs like marijuana. They dont do arm, its the people, its mankind, who's not using it wisely.

Our nature is to blame in most case, not some stupid book.

your forgetting our nature can change under influence like those books

[B~E]

And in this case, the solution ins't to censure, but to understand the book.

[Algazaleen!]

I don't think a book can change human nature, just human action.

[B~E]

Originally Posted by AZN_FLEA

your forgetting our nature can change under influence like those books

And here, you speak of something extremly interesting, of something that has so much potential that it would deserve its own thread. But insteed of developing your idea, you spit out a one-liner.

[chocofilez]

I think that it is all opinons. Mien kapmf even. sure. to us its wrong but its an opinion of the world which we all can learn from. definitely not follow but learn. Kinsey also. kinsey was actually an advancement of human science.

One harmful book, or many, are every cultures holy book. sorry religious people. the bibles give a biased opinion of everything. The bible is more agianst women than lets say porn. the bible was used to rule over people, for power money, etc. why is mankind mankind? hmmm. bible maybe? its against people who are homosexual, but as it says all man is created equal. what does it give? in my opinion, not much. It gives something to justify ones existence. i will delete this the day a lesbian woman is made the presisdent or whatever of a muslim country. for that fact, any. or a midgit black lesbian pope. could take for some people to realize they are not the devil in flesh.

[Forged]

I personally think 'The Prince' is a tad more dangerous than 'The Communist Manifesto', or anything by Niez. I am suprised they didn't throw in The Satanic Bible....

#Edit
After looking it up I realized The Prince is 400 years old not 200. The point still stands though.

[betaalpha5]

i had a feel that Mein Kampf would be up there. this list is soo 1 sided

[Tipsy]

Originally Posted by chocofilez

One harmful book, or many, are every cultures holy book. sorry religious people. the bibles give a biased opinion of everything. The bible

To finish your sentence, is quite a lot older than two hundred years, yet I will respond to every point you make about it even though this point alone deems it pointless to this discussion.

is more agianst women than lets say porn.

The first and foremost statement used in this argument is that men are superior to women because of the Adam and Eve story. This has been denounced a very long time ago from the Vatican. Also, I'm guessing the bible is used against women because arguable one of the most important figures in the bible is a woman. Mary, the prophet of prophets, delivered the teachings of God to us through Jesus. Giving a woman the position as the spiritual mother of the church that bore the son of God someone denounces women. Somehow, the only human that did not sin, only being surpassed by Jesus Christ, God himself, if offensive to women. It may just be me, but I just can see what you are saying.

the bible was used to rule over people, for power money, etc.

So the bible is evil because people do not follow its' teachings and then use it to rule over people? You are saying the bible itself is evil, only because somebody used it in the exact opposite way it says human beings should act? I simply see no point in your argument here either.

why is mankind mankind? hmmm. bible maybe? its against people who are homosexual, but as it says all man is created equal.

Wait, so hating the sin and not the sinner is somehow hating the sinner? I am slightly confused with your reasoning here. For the sake of argument, let us say that it says homosexuality is wrong, because as BFH would point out, some sects of Christianity do not believe homosexuality is a sin. Continuing on this, how is it telling someone that something they do is evil, hating them? The bible says 'thou shall not kill', does that mean it is evil because it is against what murderers do? I simply cannot see how hating the sin and not the sinner ends up with you hating the sinner.

what does it give? in my opinion, not much.

In my opinion, it is the word of God, the most important book ever written, and the only true morality, with no space for relativism. Your opinion is that it doesn't give much, my opinion is the exact opposite.

It gives something to justify ones existence.

The thread I just responded to I talked about this. What if I said that the only reason that you don't believe in the bible is because you are rebelling against society? That makes just as must sense to you, as what you just said does to me. The bible does not give us a way to justify our life, because it is already there.

i will delete this the day a lesbian woman is made the presisdent or whatever of a muslim country. for that fact, any. or a midgit black lesbian pope. could take for some people to realize they are not the devil in flesh.

And I will delete this post the day that the shroud of ignorance that stops people from actually learning about and understanding the bible is lifted instead of throwing accusations at it that can easily be thrown away by reading and understanding the book before you attack it.

And yet I could have condensed this entire post to the sentence, "The bible is not two hundred years old" to destroy any meaning for this discussion that comes from your argument.

Religious rant complete.

[blink_penguin]

"HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars..."
Well at least they're honest about being biased. Honestly, the inclusion, let alone headlining of the communist manifesto is ridiculous. It's incredible how much more damaging they seem to think it is than the other books.
On the other hand, of course, looking at it from a point of view of lives destroyed, it could be said that Marx's works had contributed to stalin's rise... Possibly more destructive (If less widely published) than Hitler's reign (I'm not sure about exact numbers of deaths due to stalin, this may be bulls*** I'm typing here).
Of course, that point of view of removes any relevancy of the non-political works in that list.
I'm writing them off as crackpots....

[B~E]

Originally Posted by blink_penguin

(I'm not sure about exact numbers of deaths due to stalin, this may be bulls*** I'm typing here).
Of course, that point of view of removes any relevancy of the non-political works in that list.
I'm writing them off as crackpots....

No, you're right, Staline killed more poeple. He didn't have such a high impact as Hitler, but in sheer number, Staline win. And I wouldn't qualify them as crackpot. Just "bible-belt" conservative people.

Originally Posted by Forged

I personally think 'The Prince' is a tad more dangerous than 'The Communist Manifesto', or anything by Niez. I am suprised they didn't throw in The Satanic Bible....

#Edit
After looking it up I realized The Prince is 400 years old not 200. The point still stands though.

In The Prince, Nicolas teach us that moral has no way into politics, and that the ends justify the means. It may be machavelic (har !) but it certainly isn't domageable in a mesurable manner.

[TheJanitor]

So the bible is evil because people do not follow its' teachings and then use it to rule over people? You are saying the bible itself is evil, only because somebody used it in the exact opposite way it says human beings should act? I simply see no point in your argument here either.

And yet I could have condensed this entire post to the sentence, "The bible is not two hundred years old" to destroy any meaning for this discussion that comes from your argument.

Instead of having a 'rant' on how the Bible was harmful I will denounce your post by saying this thread is about the most harmful book, not the most evil. The truth is, the Bible has caused more deaths by more hands that most likely any other book made.

Note* The most Evil book in the world can (has) cause a lot less harm than the most Holy.

[chocofilez]

Good points all. I started that for the sake of argument and got more than i thought i would. No, i do not think that the bible is or was evil. what i am trying to say is that is has been used manipulatively for personal gain. It was very easy for popes etc. to get power riches etc. from manipulating the bible. Then again, i do admire those people who are religeous and can handle other views without getting over defensive (no reference to ayn 1 here).
Im sorry i was mistaken about the adamn eve thing but that doesnt meen that the bible isnt biased. Yes its true that mary carried jesus, but we couldnt have a man do that could we. therefore, they made god He/Him initialy male and jesus too. Mos t of the well know saints are also male. There are famaous females like Joan of Arc but kids in school etc. are not taught about many other female saints.
I find it is also a way to manipulate kids. Rules regulations etc. Though this is not the wa the bible is or was intended to be (maybe it was or maybe it wasnt), there are points like these that bring questions. I like your argument. And sorry about the over aged book. Just thought it would be a good controversial subject and was to much of a newbie to make a new thread.

[Tipsy]

Originally Posted by Thejanitor

Instead of having a 'rant' on how the Bible was harmful I will denounce your post by saying this thread is about the most harmful book, not the most evil. The truth is, the Bible has caused more deaths by more hands that most likely any other book made.

Note* The most Evil book in the world can (has) cause a lot less harm than the most Holy.

Blaming the bible for people using wrong is like somebody suing a medicine company because they did follow the instructions on the bottle. I'm going to go take a fatal dose of medicine which the bottle says not to do, and then have my family sue the company because I was too ignorant to read the label.

Instead of having a 'rant' on how the Bible was harmful I will denounce your post by saying this thread is about the most harmful book, not the most evil.

And I will denounce what you just said by referring you to the thread title. The 'evil' book is not under discussion here.

There are famaous females like Joan of Arc but kids in school etc. are not taught about many other female saints.

The only saints that are taught, atleast where I live, in the political-correctness capital of the world, the word 'saint' can't even be in our text books. Most of the people in my class probably didn't even know some of the people they learned about were saints.

Also, if you want to blame anything for the lack of women in the bible, take a look at the time period it was written in. The historical background of the period makes it nearly impossible for no one except the utmost important women to be placed in the bible.

[chocofilez]

Exactly. All important people at the time with maybe a few exceptions were men.