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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: 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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