Top Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Top Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries - HUMAN EVENTS

1. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Marx and Engels were the intellectual godfathers of communism.

2. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust.

3. Quotations From Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
In 1966, he published Quotations as a tool in the “Cultural Revolution” he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction.

4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
“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 four, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial,” the Washington Times reported.

5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
In Democracy and Education, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead.

6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
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.

7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
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.

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
He therized that the human mind had developed beyond “theology,” through “metaphysics,” to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

9. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
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. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
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.

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