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Summary: A Challenge to our Historical Perspective
Review: This extensive tome is a ringing indictment of Communist governments over the last century as "criminal enterprises." Its condemnation is supported by archival documents that reveal crimes that cost the lives of 100 millions victims: 65 million in China, 25 million in the Soviet Union, 2 million in Cambodia, and millions more in Vietnam, North Korea, Latin America, Angola, Ethiopia, and Eastern Europe. It traces the history of militant Communism from the ideologue Karl Marx, through the blood stained regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Nicolae Ceausescu, and many others. Most victims of the Red Terror were chosen on the basis of class distinction. Sometimes, like in the Soviet Union, they were even picked to fill "a quota;" or in Cambodia, because they unfortunately lived in a city. The supposed enemy was initially dehumanized, then he was exterminated. First published in France, this best seller, authored by six respected scholars, caused a firestorm of protest. Its chief editor, Stephane Courtois, morally equated the evils of Communism with Nazism. For this act of conspicuous bravery, and political incorrectness, he was falsely denounced as "anti-Semitic" by Le Monde, a Paris newspaper. The intrepid Courtois, who was careful not to denigrate the immense suffering of the Jewish people during its holocaust, had dared to write: "The deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian Kulak as a result of famine caused by Stalin's regime is 'equal to' the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of famine caused by the Nazi regime." Famine, Courtois, insisted was "used as a weapon" by the Kremlin, especially, in the Ukraine, 1932-33, where 6 million peasants, mostly Christians, were starved to death for resisting collectivism. Courtois wondered, too, why Communist excesses have been ignored by history. Heinrich Himmler's name is recognized for barbarism, but the Bolshevik monster, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Jew, who was a mass murderer, too, and head of the dreaded Soviet's Cheka, languishes "in obscurity." This book is thoroughly researched and raises profound questions that challenge our historical perspective on militant Communism. It is a worthy chronicle of a deadly scourge that still haunts our planet.
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Summary: The Truth Laid Bare in its Full Scope
Review: Perhaps the most comprehensive and candid study of Communism yet to be written , the authors with brutal honesty lay bare the extent of the horror of the system called 'Communism' which has spread its tentacles across the globe , at its height ruling over a third of mankind, and still continues its reign of terror in some countries - 84 years after the Bolsheviks siezed power in Russia.As Martin Malia pints out in his forward what makes this book remarkable is unlike the previous studies which have been of Communist tyrannies in specific countries or regions whether in the Soviet Union , Eastern Europe , China , Cambodia , Ethiopia or elsewhere this work provides the totality of this system of total terror In his introduction Stephane Courtois gives a rough approximation of the more then 100 million people butchered by Communism USSR : 20 million deaths China : 65 million deaths Vietnam : 1 million deaths North Korea : 2 million deaths Cambodia : 2 million deaths Eastern Europe : 1 million deaths Latin America : 150 000 deaths Africa : 1.7 million deaths Afghanistan : 1.5 million deaths The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power : about 10 000 deaths All of the regions where Communism's hellish iron grip weighed down like a chain of skulls and bones have been detailed in chapters of this book by different experts There is also a chapter detailing how all major post 1945 terrorist movements including the IRA , PLO-PFLP-DFLP , and terrorist groups throughout Europe ,Asia and Africa have been given logistic and moral support by the communist powers and have usually been inspired by Communist ideology Add too this revolutionary dictatorships which were/are not officially Communist but were/are inspired by Communist ideology such as Iraq,Syria,Libya,Zimbabwe and Nasser's Egypt and it is clear just how far reaching this perfidious ideology has been Stephane Courtois points out that despite arguments of intellectual sophistry to the contrary there is no moral or empirical difference between the twin evils of Nazism and Communism."In 1950 Margaret Buber-Neumann recounted her experience of being twice deported -once to a Nazi camp and once to a Soviet camp- in an article published on 25 February in Figaro literraire , "An Inquiry on Soviet Camps : Who is worse? Satan or Beelzebub" Reading the book leaves one completely overwhekmed and revolted that there are still those who propagate , defend or downplay the evil of this ideology It is clear the world has still learned little when we see how Red China has been chosen to host the 2008 Olympic Games and a blind eye is turned away from the excesses of the existing Communist and Revolutionary regimes today
Rating: 
Summary: Fact, after fact, after fact
Review: Don't look for any entertaining Coulter/Franken type slam books here. The book was just fact after fact layed out in academic detail. 10,000 Kulaks sent here, 5000 executed there. After about the third country, I could write the chapter myself needing only to fill in the actors names and the numbers. The story was the same in country after country.
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Summary: Communism - the bloodiest murder machine of the 20th century
Review: This book should be in every school library across the country. People must know that Communism, a totalitarian system of government no better than the fascist variety, is largely responsible for making the 20th century the bloodiest in human history. Wherever the followers of Marx were able to grab power, there was repression, terror, torture, mass murder and, in many cases, class-based genocide. I cannot stress how badly this needs to be read, because I've heard far too many "useful idiots" say things such as "I don't really view communism as a bad thing." (Whoppi Goldberg) and "when Communist U.S.S.R. was a superpower, the world was better off." (Janeane Garofalo). I have a feeling that if you walked down the street and asked various people about the Soviet Gulag or Stalin's forced famine in Ukraine, you'd most likely get blank looks, because they have forgotten. This book was written to remind them. Some (mostly radical Leftists who want you to forget about the bloody history of their favorite ideology) have said that The Black Book is "biased" because it doesn't mention the atrocities of "anti-Communists" such as Pinochet, Suharto, Rios Montt, Somoza and Marcos. True, but this is a history of Communist crimes, the deliberate starvation and wholesale slaughter of *SCORES OF MILLIONS* of people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, etc, which make the crimes of the aforementioned anti-Communists pale in comparison. How many books on Nazi massacres mention Communist atrocities during WWII (Katyn, Bleiburg, Nemmersdorf, Vinnitsa, the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the deportation of ethnic minorities in the USSR, the murderous post-war expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe)? Not many. Does that mean these books on Nazi genocide are "biased" and therefore not credible for failing to mention the misdeeds committed by the other side? I don't believe so. And so what if an "anti-Communist" or a "right-winger" writes about the crimes of Communism? Don't anti-Fascists and Jews write about the evils of Nazism? While you're at Amazon.com, look up a few books on the crimes committed by the Pinochet regime in Chile (the 3,000 "disappeared" Communists and sympathizers we are always hearing about). You'll notice that nearly all of them were written by Marxists and Socialists who are pro-Allende. Perhaps we should discount them altogether? There is also some controversy over the numbers The Black Book claims to have been killed by Communism. Some say the introduction places the number too high (100 million, which is accepted by The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation). Even some contributors to the book, former Communists who are obviously not ready to completely damn the poisoned ideology of Marxism, have denounced Courtois for inflating the numbers and said they would have settled for a total of 85 million. I have to admit that I also have a problem with one estimate. The introduction places those killed by the Soviet regime from 1917-1991 at only 20 million. Many historians estimate that Stalin ALONE killed 20 million people (Robert Conquest, Daniel Chirot, Adam Hochschild, Tina Rosenberg, Wallechinsky, etc). Alexander Yakovlev, author of the excellent new book on Soviet tyranny and mass murder entitled "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia," places the Soviet death toll at 30-35 million (in my opinion the most reliable estimate). Others, such as 'atrocitologist' R.J. Rummel and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, place the Soviet death toll at a whopping 60 million! Therefore I believe it is safe to say that Communism is indeed responsible for killing *at least* 100 million people in the 20th century, making it one of the greatest evils in the annals of human history. We must never forget the 100 million. In addition to this book I would recommend the following: A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander N. Yakovlev
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
Death by Government by R.J. Rummel
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Summary: The damnation of an ideology
Review: It is appalling that, in this day and age of condemnation of anything that even remotely smells of a human rights violation, many in the Left continue to make heroes out of Lenin, Mao, (and in some cases, even Stalin), while completely ignoring the bloody legacy these madmen inflicted on the world. This book, with contributions by a number of former communists and other left-leaning sympathizers, attempts to set the record straight: Communism killed, with particularly brutal efficiency, and on a scale that far dwarfed all the crimes of Nazi Germany. This isn't just anacdotal; there's hard evidence here, including statistics and exhaustive research. And the numbers are just staggering: 10 Million dead here, another 25 Million killed there. And not by war, but by simple repression: forced famines, gulags, mass executions, cultural revolutions, and "great leaps forward". People were slaughtered, opposition ruthlessly supressed, and human rights violated on such a scale that it is mind numbing to contemplate, all in the name of creating an "equal" society. In the end, the evidence is just too overwhelming to deny: Communism is/was every bit as evil as Nazism. Extensive evidence is provided about the various genocides these regimes participated in, particularly in the Soviet Uniion (now Russia) and China. There are also sections on Eastern Europe, S.E. Asia (including a damning section on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge), Africa and Latin America (although I will admit that the arguments made in the latter two sections aren't as persuassive as the former). Also, there is a fair amount of discussion on the early days of many of these regimes, showing how narrow-minded and blood thirsty they were from the vary beginning and completely shattering the "wrong turn" contention that many modern-day Communists claim. All in all it is very well arranged and easy to use, should you need the information on hand to answer those tired leftwing polemics. If the book has a major fault it is that some of its contributors, lifelong communists many of them, are for the most part unable to bring themselves to an out-and-out repudiation of what they supported. They skirt the edges and think idly that perhaps there might have been a better way, or excuse that some of these repressions were the result of special circumstances, or whatever excuse they wish to put forward to absolve themselves of responsibility. Thankfully the editor is not this timid, and he forcefully makes up for everything his colleagues are unwilling to face up to, turning a bit of leftist soul searching into a powerful piece damning the entire ideology. A must read for all those interested in modern politics.
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Summary: Statistics of Sorrow
Review: To begin with, I have to point out that I am extremely anti-authoritarian, having no love for socialism, communism, fascism, or any other centrally planned and/or totalitarian government. However, I've never spent much time reading about the internal workings of those countries that have fallen under such foolishness because it just seems so self-evident to me. However, I have always found it ironic that while Hitler managed to knock off a few million in his "labor" camps, Stalin's crimes have managed to remain below most people's radar. Sure, people know that the USSR was repressive, but when people want to compare a dictator like Saddam Hussein with someone really bad, they invariably choose Adolph Hitler. As the authors of this book point out, the Red Terror, purges, repressions, and other atrocities committed by Lenin and his heirs Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung and his ridiculous progeny made Hitler look like an amateur. The BBoC is not an attempt to write the definitive history of every communist country, nor is any attempt made to analyze the philosophical nuances of Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism, Hoxhaism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc., or to distinguish such "actual socialisms" from the theoretical spawning grounds of Marxism, Owenism, Fourierism, Fabianism, etc. As it is, the book is over 800 pages long, so an attempt to "finally" resolve these disputes would require additional volumes. I think that criticisms of the book on that basis fail because they are accusing the authors of falling short of a goal that they did not set out to achieve. Rather, what the authors (self-described communists and fellow travelers) have actually attempted to do is to estimate the magnitude of the number of people who died in the name of class struggle. One of the tragic differences that they point out between Nazism and Communism: the SS simply killed its victims without fanfare, while the communists typically forced their victims to sign confessions, endure show trials, and participate in public self-criticism before taking a bullet to the neck (a favorite method of the KGB's predecessor, the "Cheka"). Despite the high drama, the communists and nazis both killed for the same reason (or lack thereof): victims were killed not for what they had done, but because of who they were. Both sides killed Jews, Nazis killed gypsies while Lenin and Stalin killed kulaks. They both killed people because they were related to state enemies. The major distinction between them was that Stalin and Mao were far more successful than Hitler. The authors briefly theorize that the reason Hitler's crimes are more well-known and despised is that Hitler lost a hot war, and the Nuremberg trials publicized the tragedy of the Holocaust. By contrast, Stalin and his heirs lost a cold war with a whimper, long after the worst crimes had been committed, when the few survivors were old, and when the public had no stomach for reliving those years. The other communist countries are still run by criminal gangs that have no intention of opening their records to public scrutiny. For that reason, the chapters on Eastern Europe and especially Russia are the strongest, followed by the chapter on China. The chapters on Latin America, Africa, and Afghanistan are weak. Of all of them, though, I found the chapter on Cambodia to be the most heart-breaking. I knew it was bad, but while most of the book illustrates the ledger-like listing of deaths with a few descriptions of the most inhumane policies, this chapter's author deeply affected me as (s?)he made a serious attempt to answer "Why?". As to whether it is fair to group Stalin's USSR, Khmer Rhouge, and other regimes together, the authors point out in each chapter the remarkably similar methods and timelines and the training received at the feet of the Comintern. I was surprised to find out how frequently and effectively communists used systematic starvation as a method of repression. In most every case, the communists worked with the socialists and anarchists to achieve power, then began to "liquidate" their ideological competition. (The term "liquidate" arises so often that I began to worry about becoming desensitized to it) It is quite possible that Franco won power in Spain not because the Spanish people or Hitler and and Mussolini backed him, but rather because Stalin's Comintern-backed communists were busy killing Franco's opposition in their own megalomaniacal quest. The value of this book is in pounding home the brutality of totalitarian governments. You think you know, but until you have to read page after page of tragedy, you really can't imagine the soul-crushing despair and dehumanization that leads people to rat on their relatives, trade their children for food, and even trade their children *as* food. You begin to understand the hatred that leads even an avowed Marxist like Chris Hitchens to applaud the toppling of Saddam and his Ba'athist gang of murderers.
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Summary: The TRUTH about communism
Review: This wonderful account documents, in detail, the atrocities committed by communist countries. This book lifts the veil off the lefts argument that communism was a benign force that simply wanted 'workers rights'. The truth is portrayed here in brutal detail. From Stalins mass murder of millions of Russians in the Gulag to the horrors of Cambodia, the genocide of Vietnam, the work camps in Cuba, the terror in North Korea, basically this book sheds light on the stain that was communism, no matter how many people were taken in and believed the 'people' were being helped this book shows clearly the truth, that communism succeeded in doing only one thing: killing more then 20 million civilians during the 20th century. Communism ruined the economies of the countries it took over, it destroyed the standard of living the people had and then it killed off the people who dared to disagree and it killed of the very workers who dared to actually want to vote or have any form of free speech or religion. The insidious nature of communistic ideal is brought to light here in this fascinating read, this wonderful translation. Communism was THE threat to the world in this century and this book tells this history of this threat and shows how, had communism won, the world would have fallen victim to similar atrocities. Luckily the western democracies with America in their lead stood up to the fascist ideology of communism. A must read!!! Seth J. Frantzman
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Summary: Powerful, well-researched catalog of the communist legacy
Review: This book is long overdue, as the authors mention themselves. I found the book:
1. Well-researched
2. Fully annotated with references
3. Intelligently argued and well-written
Don't be intimidated by the size and the fact it is an academic tome: Since it is a by-region and by-era historical review, one can pick it up and read from almost anywhere at one's own pace.
The historical record, concisely laid out, is a compelling read.
Highly recommended, especially to students of history and politics.
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Summary: When Lower East Side Hipsters Take Over Your Country....
Review: The pretentiousness, the dialectic materialism, the exotic brands of coffee, the black turtlenecks, the pseudo-intellectualism, the goatees.... _The Black Book of Communism: Terror, Crimes and Repression_ , published by Harvard University Press, is a huge 800 page volume cataloguing Communist atrocities. It is divided into several sections: The Soviet Union, Communist terrorism, Eastern Europe, Asian countries including China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and Third World nations in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan. As another reviewer notes, however, the figures concerning how many people were actually killed by Communists seem to be greatly exaggerated. If I don't believe that six million Jews were murdered in "The Holocaust," then I'm going to be even more hesitant claiming that sixty-five million people were killed in China under Mao Zedong. Communism is by far the most destructive ideology/political system ever imposed to date on the world's nations. The introduction and foreword to this book go to great extremes to state the case that Communism has killed many more millions and had greater political influence than Nazism ever possessed. Communism is a universal political/social/economic theory that allows it to "metastasize" around the world, adapting itself to any given situation, whereas Nazism was a blunt, in-your-face program of "national egoism." Nazism never gained an international following of any consequence whatsoever, while institutions in America, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere are stacked to the ceiling with people who openly promote Marxist theory and are (or were) members of Communist parties. Morality, as the Forward insightfully mentions, as understood today derives from political affiliations rather than any of the world's "outdated" metaphysical belief systems. Communism promotes total equality rather than a hierarchy. It is frequently defended by liberal and humanist scholars who believe Communism is a bulwark against "anti-Semitic," "redneck," "neo-Nazi" extremists who are conspiring to exterminate Jews, rape women, enslave Blacks and force homosexuals back "into the closet." These same people have a fondness for the Lower East Side, where the Bolshevik revolutionaries hung out while plotting to overthrow the Tsar before WWI and institute their reign of atheist and Jewish inspired terror. The people behind the authorship and promotion of this book are rather interesting as well. The seven French authors who researched and compiled the book are left-wing ex-Marxists. Furthermore, _The Black Book_ was translated from French into English and published by Harvard University, not necessarily the most conservative institution.
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Summary: The Blackness of judeo-bolshevism, PC-style
Review: A thorough study of the worst racial killing machine in history, which in the conservative estimation of the authors cost some 100 million lives of goyim. Never mind, the perpetrators of these genocides specialize in killing "cattle." After all, communism was invented by Karl Marx, scion of a long line of rabbis, and nurtured along its bloody path by the parasites Lasalle, Kautski, Bernstein, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kaganovich and thousands of others of their race, including the financier of the violent takeover of Russia, Jacob Schiff. And later, who in AmeriKwa spied for the commies but the Rosenbergs, Greenglass, Coplon, Hall, Sobell and Harry Dexter White (Weiss)? It is this key racial question which is missing from the "Black Book," and it therefore needs to be supplemented by such classic works as Britton's "Behind Communism" and Eckhart's "Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin."
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