Thursday, June 02, 2005

A couple of days ago, Human Events Online published its list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries," as chosen by a panel of right-wingers. One of my readers, Dan Case, has sent his own list:

Atlas Shrugged. Goes without saying. Yes, she would be horrified at the Bush Administration too. But she can't escape culpability for its obscene corporatism.

Losing Ground by Charles Murray, a very misleading and influential attack on the nation's social-welfare system.

The Real Anita Hill by David Brock. Yes, he repented and that's good, but without it the whole Mighty Wurlitzer attack-machine culture would have been very different.

The Decline of the West by [Oswald] Spengler (or whatever it was called that breathed so much life into fascism, racism and imperialism in the 1920s).

Mein Kampf (of course we can all agree on that).

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Still used by antisemites today.

What is to be Done?, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. This pamphlet had far more to do with creating the Soviet Union than anything Marx ever wrote.

How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer. He and Sayyid Qutb would agree on an awful lot ("In a fallen world, some force will always be necessary"). Without this book there is no fin-de-siécle American Christian fundamentalism. Read more about him here. He is little mentioned today but as stealthily influential as Rand.

Some work by Podhoretz or Kristol pères that's a fundamental text of neoconservatism ... can't think of which one.

No, I'm not putting Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh or like ilk on this list, nor any fundamental paleocon text like Goldwater or Kirk. The former are too pathetic; the latter actually represent today a respectable conservatism that opposes the Iraq War.


Not bad -- any thoughts? Any suggestions?

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