Rating: 
Summary: Lets Be Fair
Review: Studies show that Capitalism, whose crimes go far unnoticed and far more accepted, their number of deaths are even greater than that of Communism. Also, just because a nation calls itself "Communist", doesn't make it so. Just as plenty of nations have called themselves Democratic but do not follow Democratic principles. The USSR was an aberration, just read Trotsky and his comments on the regime to get a better perception of this. Trotsky correctly predicted that the USSR and China was going to grow more and more Capitalist since it was a dictatorship of the Ruling Commisar Class and not true Communism. I mean, we have to be fair and I hope that all the people who are the streotypical, apple-pie , America all the way die hard who only likes thinking in simplistic terms: We good, they really bad will read a "Black Book of Capitalism" book, lets see if they will.
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Summary: The true nature of the leviathan state.
Review: When this book was published several years ago, the author came under heavy scrutiny by the European press who acted suprised by the book's contents--the contents being, that what most communist regimes should be remembered for is killing alot of people (around 100 million, to be precise). Robert Conquest had already brought some of the Soviet atrocities to the West's attention in his "Harvest of Sorrows" by the time this book was made available, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn had also done so previously in his "Gulag Archipalego," but the body count is even higher this time since Courtois brings China's figures (65 million) into the equation. Sometimes when I'm debating a socialist, I get the feeling (usually during the middle part of the debate) that if God himself descended from the skies at any given moment with a giant monitor that displayed footage of the mass starvations and deliberate murder that took place under these governments for the lefty to see, he'd still find excuses to remain in denial mode (which seems to be a popular way of handling this information for the leftists on here who've given this book a one star rating). A message to all the malignant-meaning "anti-fascists" out there: read it and weep (but make sure your blindfold has been removed first).
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Summary: communism has to be worse than fascism
Review: This book is just plain silly. I see Dr. Evil, little finger on the corner of his mouth, hissing: "100 billion victims of communism!". The claims made in this book are just plain impossible unless one counts every person who died of any cause in a communist country as a victim of communist repression. Using the kind of historiography used by the authors of this tract one could easily count 200 million victims of Capitalism. In real life the actual, documented victims of communist repression were far fewer than than the actual, documented victims of Capitalism in all its guises including European Imperialism, Fascism, Nazism, and American sponsored dictatorship in the so-called "Free World". It's ironic that the authors include French people since that country's only viable resistance to the Nazis came from Communists. Most of the statistics used by these propagandists are undocumented "best guess" estimates of people who died in famines and other natural disasters blamed on communist regimes. The problem with this kind of "history" is that it isn't true. I thought maybe there would be some new documentation but really the only documented victims included are the 750,000 people we KNOW Stalin had shot during the Yeshovschina and probably a few million (isn't that enough?!?) who died in Soviet and Chinese labor camps respectively. As far as Cambodia and Ceaucescu's Romania, don't forget that these two states were the West's buddies at times because they were anti-Soviet. I guess it isn't enough for some rabid anticommunists that the Soviet Union is gone; they seek to change history too. It may make some people feel better but that doesn't make it true.
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Summary: You Say You Want a Revolution?
Review: As the Beatles' song goes on to say, "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." Unfortunately, those who blatantly profess their allegiance to communism still get seated at the polite tables of civilization. This book provides plenty of evidence why the communist should be afforded even less sympathy in civil society than the professed fan of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, amongst other startling revelations in this book is that Nazi death camps were partially modelled on Soviet labor camps. To be sure the subtitle, "Crimes, Terror, Repression," refers to a horrifying, sometimes mind-numblingly long list of tortures, familiar and unfamiliar, to the body and spirit, and the 700 plus pages of text are not a pleasant read. Still, this book is a valueable. For starters, it refutes a propaganda point that communist governments, particularly the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, liked to use: that they were the bulwark against fascism. Not only did the USSR, in a non-aggression pact, collude with Hitler, but it actively killed fellow anti-fascists in Spain and before and during its war with Hitler. As the book documents, communist parties the world over habitually killed fellow communists who deviated from the necessary purity, and they also killed those who struggled with them against colonial powers in Southeast Asia and against Batista's dictatorship in Cuba. The communists in Russia, after the 1917 revolution, killed more political opponents in two month's than the Czar did in 80 years. Though it's not the first to do so, the book documents that the Russian experiment in communism was not some relatively peaceful affair launched by Lenin and betrayed by a bloodthirsty Stalin. To be sure, the paranoid Stalin launched immense purges, forced labor projects, and engineered famines, but terror was a principle embraced and practiced from the beginning by Lenin. The book also refutes the commonly recited falsehood that Mao bettered the average Chinese's lot. His policies directly led to perhaps the greatest famine in history, and he was not above conducting his own purges. Most of these crimes against their supposed beneficiaries are documented not only through secondary histories but also primary sources of survivor accounts and government documents. The book is divided into sections covering communism in five different manifestations: Soviet, Eastern European, Asian, the Third World, and attempts to foster international revolution via the Comintern and terrorism. China and Russia get several chapters each but most other countries that had communist regimes get at least one chapter. The book draws two general distinctions between the communism of Asia and the Soviet Union and its satellites. The Soviet model emphasized political murder of its opponents and citizens (though it was willing to simply exploit them as economic assets in labor camps). While China also has labor camps and a history of bloody repressions against its citizens, it also developed a program of trying to change the mind of its citizens as well as compel obediance through terror. The Khmer Rouge model, built by the secretive Pol Pot, combined the worst of both: idealogical reprogramming and murder. To be sure, if you're not familiar with the history of some of the covered countries, the relevant chapters seem like a collection of strange names and obscure events. This is particlarly true of the sections on Eastern Europe where the authors assume a certain knowledge of the background politics and figures. On the other hand, the book is genuinely informative even to someone like me, a neophyte, in its chapters on communist politics in Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Not only are communist crimes there covered but the background history is also explained well. The chapter on NKVD death squads in Spain is not the first revelation of their activities but does serve as a good summary. This book was originally published in France, and the introduction, added for the American edition, talks about its fallout there where a politican's and intellectual's previous relationship to communism can have some real effects on his public reception. The final chapter tries to answer the question on whether terror was a principle of communism from the beginning. Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century did not generally preach using terror as a tool to utopia. Indeed, communism was a formerly recognized political philosophy accorded legitimacy via officially recognized and tolerated parties in several countries before the Russian Revolution. The book seems to blame Lenin and Russia's tradition of political violence for the brutal turn communism took. Several of the authors are interested in the question of whether ex-communists in Eastern Europe should be punished and, if so, how. What the book is starkly lacking is an attack on the practiciality of communism as an organizing economic principle. I suspect this is not only because it is outside the book's intended scope but also because, as alluded to in the introduction, some of the editors may sympathize with the proclaimed ends of communism. The book also fails to mention the failed medieval experiments in communism, many of them violent, covered in Norman Cohn's classic THE PURSUIT OF THE MILLENNIUM.
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Summary: No, they didn't build the Berlin Wall to keep people out!
Review: This is a superb book. It is written by authors who are of the political Left. When I was an academic in Australia before 1989, there were other academics who were so crazy that they thought the Berlin Wall was built, because otherwise too many Westerners would want to go East to the worker's paradise! These are the same people who thought that Lee Harvey Oswald was a John Bircher, even though he had lived in the Soviet Union for a time. This book is the ultimate answer to these people. They tend to get really upset and deny they ever were apologists for the evil of European communism, but at least they can no longer lie about what went on in Eastern Europe. A great book, a fair book, a dispassionate book. It is not an apology for Nazism. It is an exposure of the evils of communism.
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Summary: Finally, some objective truth!
Review: "Destroy 6 million in the name of genocide, and the world will stand against you, but kill 10 times as many in the name of political expediency, and they will ignore you" The book is NOT an easy read, but filled in some blanks I had regarding the perversion of socialist philosophy. Stalin and company's crimes were much more heinous than the Nazi's; they did not just target various classes and groups, they exterminated them. Famine used as a sword of war originated with them. This book should disenchant any sensible reader of the "beauty" of this "idealist" system that eliminated class warfare by exterminating the classes, excoriated many outside its reach with COMINFORM and COMINTERN,and, even now, usage of gulag prisoners to unfairly grab a large portion of the global market due to almost no overhead in production.It is unfortunate that this book could not be used as a basis for some sort of college course. It has a lot to teach.
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Summary: The sheer truth
Review: This book aims to describe communism's "contribution" to mankind. And it indeed does so, in a most concise and terrifyingly calm way. The book does NOT attempt to "defend" or "soften" nazism (as left wing sympathisers were quick to claim after it was published), but merely proves: If you you say nazism was horrific, well, take a look at communism. I hope you will read this book, it really deserves attention. It will (and does already) irritate the numerous individuals who tried to compare communist regimes to capitalism ... and is necessary reading to every true democrat - it could all happen again, you know. The book is composed by several chapters written by different authors, "A State against its People...", "World Revolution, Civil War and Terror", "The other Europe: Victim of Communism", "Communism in Asia..." and "The Third World". The contents is sometimes shocking, the truths in it appalling. If you like the eye-opening books by Jean-Francois Revel, Christopher Andrews, Oleg Gordievsky and Victor Suvorov, this is a must read.
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Summary: Where's the BLACK Book of CAPITALISM????
Review: The research in this book is all well and good, but shouldn't we all CONSIDER THE SOURCE and his ideological motives? Many of the "crimes" discussed therein were the DIRECT result of aggression by Capitalist/Imperialist nations. I AM NOT defending communist regimes - I am just playing devil's advocate here. In addition, the author FAILS to mention the millions of anarchists that were killed by communists and of course no comparison with the MUCH MORE numerous and insidious crimes committed DAILY in the name of "American Democracy" and Capitalist profits is mentioned even in passing. You'd all be better off reading the works of Noam Chomsky, Subcommandante Marcos, and Murray Bookchin.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is excellent - as a radio journalist, I find it an invaluable resource. Much needed to counter the lies of the supporters of Cuba, North Korea, and the old Soviet Union.
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Summary: READ IT IF YOU ENJOY FREEDOM & YOU HATE MURDER & REPRESSION!
Review: For almost a half of century the communist experience murdered 120 millions of people. In the mean time, in the civilised countries, socialist and communist politicians defended the ideea of a comunist society, ignoring what was happening in the already communist countries. "The Black Book of Communism" shows for the first time as a whole the size of the crime against humanity that communism represented.-------------------------------------You may be a socialist yourself, or you may think that this is "bourgeois propaganda". In this case, you ought to think that when a man is murdered under the accusation of beeing "bourgeois" or "reactionar" (his fault beeing indeed his intelligence or his wealth), any ideological discussion becomes imoral. For you are not allowed to speak about doctrines and ideology when a man is murdered under your eyes. And if the murder is justified by a doctrine or an ideology, that something has to be wrong about it.-------------------------------------I believe that "The Black Book of Communism" should be read by anybody who enjoyes freedom in his country: this way he will know how to prevent that freedom to be replaced by repression.
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