Since I’ve been posting so much about the Victims of Communism Memorial, it’s only appropriate to feature The Black Book of Communism, a long chronicle of the murder and slavery that this awful ideology brought to the Twentieth Century. This book is just as hard to read as you imagine—over 800 pages of torture, brutality, government-created famine, and mysterious disappearances in the middle of the night. The totals? They’re difficult to accurately measure, of course, but “we have to start somewhere,” writes editor Stéphane Courtois.
The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes:U.S.S.R.: 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.The total approaches 100 million people killed.
Note that this estimate is significantly lower than the estimate of R.J. Rummel’s book Death By Government, which estimates Stalin alone as having killed 60 million.
The atrocities described—and the photographs provided—by this book make it extraordinarily unpleasant reading. A German communist, who was nevertheless a Soviet dissident, was arrested by the Soviets and put into forced labor in the Spanish Civil War. After he escaped, in December, 1939, he told friends
What we lived through in July was horrible and cruel. Dostoyevsky’s House of The Dead is nothing in comparison…. And we were so hungry that we were often delirious. I’m half the man I used to be, just skin and bones. We were ill all the time and had no strength left at all. There’s no difference between men and animals when you get down to that stage, it’s just pure barbarism. Fascism still has a lot to learn from those bandits; it’s culture and luxury in comparison. It must have been written in our files that we were literally to be worked to death by legal means, because that’s exactly what they tried to do.
Nevertheless, intellectuals on the left resented the publication of The Black Book of Communism, and resist acknowledging or discussing the crimes it discusses. In the book’s foreword, by Martin Malia—author of The Soviet Tragedy, former UC Berkeley professor and writer for New Republic and the New York Review of Books—explains that
[i]n the twentieth century…morality is not primarily a matter of eternal verities or transcendental imperatives. It is above all a matter of political allegiances. That is, it is a matter of left versus right… [T]he Communist project, in origin, claimed commitment to universalistic and egalitarian goals, whereas the Nazi project offered only unabashed national egoism [sic]…. And so we arrive at the fulcrum of the debate: A moral man can have “no enemies to the left,” a perspective in which undue insistence on Communist crime only “plays into the hands of the right”—if, indeed, anticommunism is not simply a mask for antiliberalism…. [But] the truth is the truth, and denying it mocks the causes both of humanity and morality.
Most importantly, Malia emphasizes just what these leftist apologists most despise: that “ideology [is] the wellspring of Communist mass murder.” Yet so long as people like Howard Zinn—who claims that the Cold War was just concocted by evil capitalists as a means to terrorize American workers into submission—and Noam Chomsky—whose Marxism has reached the level of psychotic conspiracy theororizing—are given a place as opinion makers and teachers, the Nazis will retain their deserved place in the dark pantheon of human evil, while the communists escape that equally deserved fate. Nor do American leftists deserve all the blame. For so long as American “conservatives” continue to grant the moral high ground to communists, by sharing their view that self-sacrifice and servitude is moral—so long as they continue to “disagree with the means, but not the ends” of socialism, they will perpetuate that same cruel absurdity. Writes Malia,
No matter how thoroughly the Communist failure may come to be documented…we will always have reactions such as that of a Moscow correspondent for a major Western paper, who, after the fall [of the Berlin Wall], could still privately salute the Russian people with: “Thanks for having tried!”; and there will always be kindred spirits to dismiss The Black Book, a priori, as “right-wing anti-Communist rhetoric.” For more mundane observers, however, it is at last becoming clear that our current qualitative judgments are scandalously out of line with the century’s real balance sheet of political crime.
The Black Book of Communism is, simply, the most horrifying book you will ever encounter. (I hope!) You will not enjoy reading it, or even owning it. But you must.
Previous entries in the Libertarian Bookworm series are here.
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