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Summary: NG
Review: NG
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Summary: The love of communism
Review: Just a short review. We in American have been bombarded by how communism works, how our colleges preach it and how the liberal left endorses it. This book just proves how deadly it really is and why we as Americans have to have a very strong foreign policy. Thank God for Senator Mcarthy who made communist traitors and their kind accountable. Thank you jason lantz
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Summary: Communism at its finest
Review: Unlike most academics, i will not claim to know more than the victims and survivors. This book clearly documents the atrocites commited in the name of the state. I will not bore the reviewer with details, but this book will help you understand why people still risk life and limb to escape communist countries.
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Summary: Extremely biased - but always interesting
Review: "The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression" was written as an attempt to show that Marxism/Leninism is worse than Nazism when it comes to murdering people. It suggested that Lenin began the plans of mass murder perfected under Stalin as soon as he came to power. "The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression" aims to show that this cycle of repression, mass murder and even famine has been repeated everywhere that Communist parties have come to power.The book looks in great detain at the Soviet Union and how, from the time of the Civil War, Lenin and Stalin were always using secret police in order to remove opponents of the regime - backed up by decrees. The book moves in detail - though not too hard to read - through the 1922 and 1933 famines and into the Great Purge (Yezhovschina) of the late 1930s. It also shows that in fact there were many rebellions in the forced labour camps - inevitably put down by violence. The book also shows that the Comintern - formed in the 1920s to spread the Russian Revolution - used guerilla warfare constantly in nations neighbouring the Soviet Union in the effort to spread revolution. We shockingly see how anarchists and Trotskyists fighting fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain were murdered by Stalin when they escaped to Russia. After Russia, the book moves on to Eastern Europe, where the regimes brutally crushed opposition and also had extensive quarrels within the parties. In these we find shockingly that policies had nothing to do with which leaders Stalin and his heirs wished to eliminate - rather they were eliminated based on their background and work experience, which varied from country to country. The detail here is very good, except for Yugoslavia and Albania where it should have been more extensive - though Yugoslavian archives remain inaccessible, whilst Albanian archives can barely have been studied. Next there are excellent studies of the Maoist regimes in China and Cambodia, where we see mass murder through the desire to form vast peasant communes. The Great Leap Forward lead to a disastrous famine, and the Khmer Rouge's forced relocation was just as appalling. North Korea is shown to have organised purges on a scale not rivalled even in Russia, whist regimes in Africa and Latin America are shown to have established similar institutions - concentration camps, secret police, and vast guerilla networks. However, the book is fatally flawed in several important ways. Most importantly, it fails utterly to notice that a great deal of the violence of these regimes relates to the desire of imperialist ruling classes to crush Marxism. These imperialist ruling classes have armed Muslim fundamentalists (including Osama Bin Laden) in Afghanistan and the contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Crimes listed as committed by Afghan Communists or the Sandinistas were, in the main, actually the work of imperialist counterrevolutionary forces. In Russia, the Whites killed as many people as the Cheka, whilst the US military's behaviour in Vietnam is well-known, as is US support for brutal anticommunist dictators like Suharto and Mobutu Sese Seko, who were at least as murderous as Kim Il Sung and Enver Hoxha. Moreover, Trotskyist and anarchist arguments that the regimes condemned in this book are state capitalist are not even mentioned, in spite of the fact that the authors do admit that in fact it was the workers and peasants who suffered most from the dictators' power. In the case of North Korea the writers show very clearly how hierarchical North Korean society actually is with its strata from the Kim family through the bureaucracy to Party rank and file downwards - quite in contrast to Marx's theory of classless society. Trotskyists and anarchists ought to be taken seriously by anybody wishing to assess communism - and I recommend that you read their writings carefully. Interesting, but looks at only one perspective.
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Summary: Communism: The Red Menace.
Review: _The Black Book of Communism_ is a collection of historical essays by former communists, journalists, and former "fellow travellers" of communism dealing with the results of one of the most vile political ideologies ever developed by man. The book outlines in great detail the implementation of communistic regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia, and South America, and the bloodshed, terror, and atrocity that inevitably results. In total, the ideology developed by the German "Left Hegelian" philosopher Karl Marx, has resulted in over 200,000,000 deaths as well as a great deal of political and economic damage to the countries in which it has been implemented. The mere 25 million killed by the other totalitarian regime of the twentieth century - Nazism - pales in comparison. This is to say nothing of the secret collaboration between Stalinism and Nazism during and after the Second World War. Through its implementation in Russia and China, communism resulted in mass famine, unemployment, economic breakdown, and totalitarian rule where citizens lived in constant fear of the secret police or of being carried off in the night to work in the gulags. In 1931, Pope Pius XI warned the world about the dangers of communism in his encyclical _Quadragesimo anno_. He writes: "Communism teaches and seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare and the complete eradication of private ownership. Not secretly or by hidden methods does it do this, but publicly, openly, and by employing any means possible, even the most violent. To achieve these objectives, there is nothing it is afraid to do, nothing for which it has respect or reverence. When it comes to power, it is ferocious in its cruelty and inhumanity. The horrible slaughter and destruction through which it laid to waste vast regions of Eastern Europe and Asia give evidence of this." Why such an ideology would continue to draw support from many of those on the Left who claim to advocate ideals of equality and fraternity, but especially of liberty, is beyond comprehension. Wherever it attacks, communism leaves a trail of blood and economic destruction. While the Soviet Union has collapsed, the United States continues to face the threat of communism in the form of the Chinese regime, North Korea, and various Southeast Asian and South American countries to this very day. Certainly those concerned for human rights and liberties in the world must recognize the great evil that is perpetuated through this pernicious philosophy. The Red Menace continues to threaten all bastions of freedom and hope in the world to this day. This book is well written and thoroughly documented and it is a must read for all those concerned about the future of humanity, the modern state, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the modern world.
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Summary: For whom the bell tolls - Marx and Lenin
Review: Whether Communism is responsible for the death of 100 million or "only" 50 million, what's the point? Communisim can never escape the truth that it sought to execute people based upon class, envy, their belief in individualism, or their secret thoughts against the state. Communism's foundations that everyone is equal in every way (except for the leaders, of course), from those who can to those who can't (Marx), is based upon the use of absolute force and state-slavery. Communism is not a utopia or an ideal, it is a nightmare of imprisonment from cradle to grave, and this book is proof!
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Summary: The Menace of the Reds.
Review: This book thoroughly documents all the crimes of the Reds, and their vicious assaults upon humanity. It is a must read for those of us who care about our future. You will come to understand how the burden of bad ideas has made itself manifest in totalitarian regimes. Thoroughly excellent in every respect.
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Summary: The Truth Hurts
Review: This book needed to be written. It manages to successfully bury several myths about Communism, not the least of which being the idea that it was an ideology designed to progress mankind. The truth has finally come out and it speaks volumes about the sheer bestiality of this destructive and genuinely evil philosophy. Certain vested interests have seen to it that the relatively few Right-wing dictatorships around the world have been given the worst possible press, but Communism has always got off lightly. It is now about time to rectify this gross and immoral fallacy. The truth hurts - and it especially hurts the fools who see some sort of salvation in Marxism, but truth, fortunately, cannot be suppressed forever. Let this be a warning to those who are still trying to do so.
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Summary: Long overdue---knocks Solzhenitsyn into the shade!
Review: For far too long, many in academia and the arts have done all they could to ignore or play down Communist atrocities, for various reasons. After this book came out, they had absolutely no more excuses.
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Summary: Good start, but China chapter needs major revision.
Review: This book is important for 2 reasons. It's the first book to put together the stories of communist atrocities into one volume, so future historians can clearly see the common thread running throughout (and the differences). Secondly, though others have noted this before, the authors do a good job of identifying Lenin's theory and practice, i.e. his concept of a political party assuming absolute power and being the sole determiner of "truth", as the root cause of all this violence. However, with 65 million of the 100 million killed coming from China, this book cannot be the definitive accounting of communist atrocities until some substantial errors in that chapter are corrected. Fairer than many, Margolin acknowledges the 1960-62 famine, while made possible by the general absence of free speech, was, unlike some other communist famines, non-deliberate. Yet there is a problem with the given range of 20-43 million above the normal deaths. An average of all the serious estimates by western demographers would be close to the bottom of this range. The defector Chen Yizi's 43 million figure is neither defined as to what it purports to represent (total mortality or above the normal mortality?), and is internally illogical in its provincial totals (Sichuan should be 4 times higher than any other). And, in fairness to the PRC, we should not only measure above the normal deaths during the terrible 1960-62 period, but also below the normal deaths in 1954-58 and 1963-79; with "normal" here being the crude death rate performance of comparable countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Central America. This shows China's egalitarian land access and barefoot doctors saved 100 million+ lives. For the Cultural Revolution, Margolin admits most scholars place the total for executions and battle casualties at 400,000-1 million, yet appears to prefer Jean-Luc Domenach's figure of 2 million. No explanation is given for why the majority is wrong and Domenach right. For the 1951-52 terror against "counter-revolutionaries" - common criminals, secret society members, and the CCP's political opponents - triggered by the Korean War, he says at least 1 million were executed. This is misleading because most credible estimates are below 1 million. Those that are over 1 million are usually counting land reform and "counter-revolutionaries" together (likely true for Mao's admission of 500,000-800,000). For land reform, he says most scholars estimate 2-5 million executed. Actually, most scholars estimate 2 million for ALL early killings, and the most careful examinations were by Stephen Shalom ("Deaths in China Due to Communism" available from Arizona State's Center for Asian Studies) and Benedict Stavis ("The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China" pgs 23-32) who estimated around 1.3 million. The 5 million figure, which originated with the otherwise excellent scholar Jacques Guillermaz, was not the result of a detailed inquiry, but baseless hand-waving, see Shalom's book. There are roughly 15 English language village studies which contain relevant local evidence on land reform killings. He cites only William Hinton's "Fanshen", pointing out that a nationwide generalization of this village's killing rate yields 5 million deaths. But Margolin fails to tell readers that this village was so abnormally violent that the central government found out about it and sent a special team to this village to investigate and put a stop to this. "Fanshen" supports Shalom's and Stavis' figure, not Margolin's. Margolin implies class was the motive for the killings, but village studies indicate the motive was, at least equally as often if not more often, revenge for acts of violence committed under the Japanese, warlords, or Chiang Kai-Shek's scorched earth campaigns. Margolin claims 20 million labor camp deaths. For the number of prisoners (50 million), a source is Harry Wu, a gulag victim, who deserves great sympathy, but not credibility because of his reputation for making sensationalistic claims. The other is, again, Jean Luc Domenach. We are not told how Domenach arrives at such an extraordinarily high labor camp population, which conflicts with other evidence. A 5% above the normal death rate for prisoners is claimed, no explanation given. We have a rough idea how many victims of the "anti-rightist" witch hunt were still in labor camps in 1963 and we know roughly how many were released from 1976-1981. Therefore, we can estimate a range of possible prisoner mortality rates. A 6.5-7% annual probability of death (5% + the adult natural death rate) is way too high. There were simply too many "rightist" victims still alive for such a figure. China's labor camps were nothing like Stalin's. It should have been enough to document China's many political prisoners in the Mao era, a terrible crime itself, but the lust for a high body count is too strong.
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