May 10, 1933. Ring a bell, gentlemen?

So evidently some mental midgets in the right wing (do I repeat myself? Probably) have compiled a list of the Ten Most Dangerous Books of the 19th and 20th Century.

By and large, I'm not really shocked by any of the titles on the list; they're about what you'd expect from the Far Right: The Communist Manifesto, The Feminine Mystique,, and, amusingly, The Kinsey Report.* Might I suggest, esteemed producers of Human Events Magazine, that if you were getting more of what's in The Kinsey Report, you wouldn't feel the need to make so many hate-mongering lists? Just a thought.

I'm also not particularly shocked that the list exists at all; people have banned books since books were invented. That's probably why books came about in the first place: so we could write down dangerous information, hide it, and then kill the people who knew the information in the first place. Reading is power, and don't you forget it. We're not banning books here, but if they could, oh, you better believe that they would. Human Events and its book judges have named these titles "dangerous." Now, where else have we heard that certain books not in line with a certain [usually reactionary] strain of political thought are "dangerous," hm? Where, where, where? Oh, it's a thinker.

Anyway, no, what shocks me is the list of judges. And not so much their names, but their professions. Of the 15 judges, fully eight of them are professors. Professors. These are men (yes, all the professors were men) who make their living by studying ideas, the very things that they're so roundly condemning. I don't get it. However, contradiction seems to fly right over these men's heads: in condemning Nietzsche because he was a great favorite of Hitler's, they blithely ignore that Hitler hated and burned books by Freud and Marx, who are both prominent on the list.

I shouldn't be surprised to find that kind of flawed thinking in a group that would label books dangerous. The only dangerous books are the ones that are flung at your head by an enraged librarian. Dangerous people, however, come in all shapes. Even close-minded college professors.

^{* I was upset by all the books on this list, of course, but some of them seem so harmless, particularly the honorable mentions. Silent Spring? Yes, it's clearly dangerous to think that maybe our actions have consequences for the environment. That Rachel Carson. Coming of Age in Samoa? Oh my God! It's the radical idea that other people are not the same as we are! The horror! (Oh, and by the way, for those of you too lazy to look it up. On May 10 in 1933, the Nazis burned 20,000 "un-German" books in a Opernplatz at the center of the University of Berlin.)}