Irony In Human Events

It's been quite the week for eyebrow raising quotes. Somewhere on the 'Net Orson Scott Card, a Mormon, is having a go at Star Wars fans for believing in a religion someone made up.

Now comes a list of the world's most evil books by a publication called Human Events. They describe themselves as "The National Conservative Weekly" and they have Ann Coulter writing for them so they're probably somewhere to the far right in terms of politics. The list shows this; Marx gets a beating twice and comes first for the Communist Manifesto. What they say about Das Kapital seems a little odd, though:

[He] portray[s] 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.

Maybe it's me, but Marx probably protrays it that way because that's what it is or, at least, was when he was writing. The difference between then and now, of course, is not that capitalism has put aside its self-interestedness and become more benign, but that governments have placed limits on that self-interestedness and demanded some accountability to society. However, in this era of out-sourcing jobs to poorer countries, I don't think you can quibble too much with the definition.

You can quibble with this, though:

He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

Or you can just laugh loudly and start thinking of counter-examples and that "free" and "affluent" have to have spectacularly loose definitions in order for the statement to be true. You might also wonder who envies and might want to emulate America at this moment in History.

Two places above Das Kapital, you may notice, is The Kinsey Report. This is evil because:

The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. "Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948... stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws," the Washington Times reported last year.

As far as I can tell they mean it's a bad thing when someone tries to accurately describe an aspect of society. It suggests that, for the compilers, a book that exposes a comforting lie as a sham is evil. It's no surprise when you see Darwin is in the also rans. The whole list, apart from the few books that they couldn't ignore, seems anti-thought. Anything the forces you to look at reality and to make you notice that that reality comes up wanting is, almost by definition, evil. The description of Beyond Good & Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche manages to neatly show this, as well as an inability of the compilers to recognise themselves:

"Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

Nazis may have loved him, but currently the greatest embodiment of his ideas, as stated above, seems to me to be the Bush administration...