The World’s Most Dangerous…Books?

It sounds like some reality library-chase show on Fox. But it’s more like another piece of excremental propaganda squeezed out by Fox News: The crackpots at Human Events have cobbled together a list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.”

And some of the usual suspects are there. Main Kampf. The Communist Manifesto. The Feminine Mystique.

The Feminine Mystique?

Also on the list are The Kinsey Report and John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the book FDR based much of the New Deal on.

Can these guys hold a grudge or what?

Essentially, they’re equating Feminism and the New Deal with Marxism and Naziism.

The runners-up are even more revealing. Origin of Species. Silent Spring. Unsafe at Any Speed. Jeez, it’s pretty clear who signs their paycheck, isn’t it? Evolution: bad. Environmentalism: bad. Consumer activism: bad. It makes me wonder why they limited themselves to the past couple centuries. Relax the rules a bit, and head straight to Gutenberg. Life was so much simpler for the rich before the serf class knew how to read.

And the thing is, not one of these is a truly dangerous book. Yeah, Mein Kampf was written by a bad guy, and has some truly repellent ideas in it, I’m sure. (I’ve never read it, but I think it’s safe to assume.) But the fact is, like any political tract, it’s pretty much one guy’s opinion. The people who acted on these ideas – including the author – are dangerous, certainly. (Judging by the point score, they were almost twice as dangerous as FDR!) But it’s actions, not words, that are dangerous.

With one exception.

(Next: The Exception!)

Rob