Posted on 08/30/2012 9:23:43 AM PDT by Perseverando
Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently 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 seventy 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 Il 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 leveling 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 was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
I hope there's no confusion about the free downloads. It's not free at Harvard University Press. The Harvard U. Press site is just for info on the book. So don't flame me. I'm not trying to bait and switch.
Harvard University Press wants $53.50 and Barnes & Noble $48.26 for the hard cover book. (I don't think so!)
Get it for free in multiple electronic formats (epubs kindle, pdf) at Arhive.org - The Black Book of Communism All files are HTTPS.
Also Arhive.org is a vast resource for other electronic texts (The Federalist Papers and many, many more) for kindles, Ipads, PC's etc.
Collectivism is like a meat grinder.
It does not concern itself with suffering.
Its offense to humanity is not personal.
It is a machine. It does not feel.
And it exists, after all, to grind meat.
He is a better writer than those guys.
The people who love abstract humanity are indifferent to actual people.
Good discussion of the book and communism form 2005 here at FR. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1341941/posts
Many go far beyond that to passionate hate of most people, individually.
Indeed. There are a lot of trench graves in the ground, courtesy of ‘idealists’.
An exceptional book
BFL
I should point out that I already have a (rather bulky) paper copy of this classic. The conclusions were so grim that not all of the contributors signed off on them. But none of them (AFAIK) has backed off on his or her own entries, either. Marxists don't even try to refute this volume of work, they simply ignore it. 100 million deaths..."is a statistic."
sfl
What utter misery godless communism has wrought upon mankind over the decades. And to think, THIS is what Obama and the Democrats want and are actively working for in America.
METROPOLIS
Very well put.
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