Product Description

Already famous throughout Europe, this text opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over 70 years. "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit", Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience - in the China of "the Great Helmsman", Kim II Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's levelling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards. As the death toll mounts - as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism as established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the 20th century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #252104 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 912 pages

Customer Reviews

Essential to destroy the myth of communism
This book is a very interesting and detailed annalisys of the communist system. The authors, leanding french researchers made here a good work and were able to expose the inherent perversity of a totalitary system that murdered millions of trustful of their own citizens. This book, although not as exaustive as it could be, namely on Asia, is essential to destroy the myth of communism as a peaceful and normal society,able to work within the democratic system.

Required reading
It may be that aspects of this book have been seized on by the likes of Berlusconi, but that is the unfortunate thing about facts, and history: they can be interpreted according to people's own agenda.

This book stands on its own as a piece of monumental research, and a debunking of the various pious myths (of the sort that Robert Conquest had long made his stock-in-trade) about what actually happened in Communist regimes, whether in the Soviet states, China, South East Asia or Latin America. The get-outs that Communism was, in practice, i) well-intentioned; ii) a perversion of the "pure" Marxism of the Communist Manifestos, are the special pleading of true believers. Comparisons with Dubya and the ills of capitalism would be quite amusing were it not for the millions of dead in, to take two instances, China and Cambodia.

Most Marxist governments were not _intentionally_ evil (perhaps not even Stalin and Mao, at least at the beginning), but they were something perhaps even worse than that: well-intentioned, unreflective, ruthless and cunning leaders who would use any form of brutality to support a higher cause that all too often morphed into the self-preservation of their new elite. What they did to human beings really does not bear thinking about.

Should we care that Communists killed astronomically more people than the Nazis (another group, as it happens, opposed in the strongest terms to Anglo-American-Jewish capitalism)? Yes, we should. This book explains why. That fact that Berlusconi's advisors noted that this was a good way of bating the useful idiot Italian fellow-travellers should not get in the way of the fact. Guilt by association is, after all, a staple of totalitarian regimes.

Redress
The Black Book results from the opening up of archives in former totalitarian states and caused a sensation on release in France. It is a long overdue expose of the murderous record of the left in power across the last century. The myth of the 'well meaning' left is exploded as we are treated to details of the horrific crimes perpetrated in the name of leftist dogma. Partcularly enlightening is the chapter on Cuba - a tyranny which continues to receive misplaced support in the west. The Black Book recounts barbaric acts in a disspassionate, almost dry manner. It is all the more powerful for this. This is not a polemic but a presentation of little known facts, and is exhaustive in detail. The book is an essential document of 20th century politics. It provides welcome redress for those who suffered under the left, and a powerful argument for opposers totalitarianism in all its forms.