Posted on 09/18/2011 11:27:13 AM PDT by the invisib1e hand
The Communist Book of the Dead was published, and there are publishers and Think Tanks aplenty. I find it hard to believe that we’re getting the whole story, here.
Most american’s are indifferent to evil. The soviets were the focus of evil in the modern world.
Oh yeah, publicizing those files would do ‘our’ media and academia so much good...
Hard to understand why those bright patriots would want the info suppressed...
I’m stumped!
Don’t I know it.
Although, my personal ultimate synonym for “evil” is “Islam”.
“....and that Hollywood which still (rightfully) paints Nazis as villians never has a badword even for the likes of Stalin or Lenin-—”
.
You must keep in mind that the West (and this includes the US) was cozily in bed with communism (Stalin) in order to defeat Hitler. Democracy and communism became reluctant partners in the fight against Naziism.
Read your history and you’ll learn that Churchill sold Eastern Europe out to Stalin in a private meeting not attended by Truman.
Wow. The "critics" defend the indefensible and do everything possible to cover up evil's tracks. No wonder we are doomed to repeat history.
I have one sister who, together with her husband, went through Communist hell to adopt a child who was in a Ukranian orphanage. She experienced the labyrinth first hand, yet is so anti-capitalist and pro-union that I imagine she would agree with the comments of one of the more well-known (Marxist) critics of the book.
"Critics have argued that capitalist countries could be held responsible for a similar number of deaths. Noam Chomsky, for example, writes that Amartya Sen in the early 1980s estimated the excess of mortality in India over China due to the latter's "relatively equitable distribution of medical resources" at close to 4 million a year. Chomsky therefore argues that, "suppos[ing] we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of ... Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."[17]"
thx for pointing it out.
Thank you for posting this fascinating article. This snippet is interesting for those who haven’t read the article in its entirety:
“And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
“Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
“Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.”
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet.
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. ...Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ‘G7’ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.”
Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.
...the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock,approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. In 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.
ahh, you beat me to it! Glad you found it useful. What struck me was the reference to the Soviet influence in uniting Europe.
The largest collection of Soviet archives is located at the Hoover Institute.
They have a more extensive archive than all of Russia on writers and other historical documents.
But just as nobody bothered to the documents cited in the piece (or even the piece itself, for that matter) does anyone read them?
I’m reading the Gulag Archipeligo; A tough slog for the unmotivated reader. But I’m waiting for a long pause in Nazi or Nazi hunting movies; so focus can be put on the brutal, sadistic terrorism the Soviets visited on their own citizens. Spielberg,Hanks,Howard,Reiner— where are you?
LOL
Actually, a friend of mine, who is Fellow at Hoover told me about this.
The Russians are coming to Stanford and reacquainting themselves with the writings and history of their peoples, that was purged during the Soviet Empire.
I am told they are often shocked to be researching one subject and then accidentally stumbling upon another.
Surprise, curiosity and pride don’t begin to describe what happens.
I think your "Wow" is a bit misplaced. I read this Wiki summary and would hardly describe it as trying "to cover up evil's tracks."
ML/NJ
ping
The yam has pung.
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