Demagogue

The right-wing wacko paper Human Events has published a fun-filled list of "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

Most of the titles are predictable, amusing, although it's pretty twisted that Hitler's "Mein Kampf" comes after Marx & Engel's "The Communist Manifesto." I'm actually very surprised that "Origin of the Species" is only on the notable list and Karl Marx is on it twice, #1 and #6.

It seems pretty safe to assume that very few self-titled conservatives have actually read "The Communist Manifesto" so they don't know how little Marx's philosophy of communism has to do with the perverted consequences of real-world communism. More to the point, the liberals who are turned onto communism and/or socialism have nothing in common with the people who have tried to implement it, who are generally fascists/nationalists who label their total governmental control "communism." Not that this stops the righties from trying to paint liberals who dream of idealized, egalitarian societies with the same broad brush as, say, the governments of China or North Korea.

There's the theory then there's the practice, often they have very little to do with one another.

But that's like arguing that we don't live in a true democracy, that we really live in a federal republic-- it's lost on most people. Or that the American concept of patriotism is a few shades too close to nationalism, a concept lost on most Americans. Or that the "National Socialist Party"-- the "Nazis"-- were not socialists even if that was in their name. Most Americans in general have no clue what either communism or socialism are about, they just know they're "bad." In my experience, much of the time conservatives have very limited knowledge about the very things they loathe so much, consider that many of their fights, especially in public education, are about limiting or restricting knowledge. They often complain that learning has a "corrupting" influence influence on young minds, most notably in the anti-higher ed movement where young adults being exposed to liberal or progressive ideas is "indoctrination." Similar to their claims about "activist judges" it is the context that matters most-- a professor praising Bush in the classroom is no more an "activist" than a judge with a clear conservative background.

Anyways, enough of my rambling, it's a nice outline of influential books that convervatives truly hate/fear coming from a paper that has been publishing people such as Ann Coulter for years.