Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois, Mark Kramer, Jonathan Murphy, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin ISBN: 0-674-07608-7 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $42.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (84 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: When Lower East Side Hipsters Take Over Your Country....
Comment: The pretentiousness, the dialectic materialism, the exotic brands of coffee, the black turtlenecks, the pseudo-intellectualism, the goatees....
_The Black Book of Communism: Terror, Crimes and Repression_ , published by Harvard University Press, is a huge 800 page volume cataloguing Communist atrocities. It is divided into several sections: The Soviet Union, Communist terrorism, Eastern Europe, Asian countries including China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and Third World nations in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan. As another reviewer notes, however, the figures concerning how many people were actually killed by Communists seem to be greatly exaggerated. If I don't believe that six million Jews were murdered in "The Holocaust," then I'm going to be even more hesitant claiming that sixty-five million people were killed in China under Mao Zedong.
Communism is by far the most destructive ideology/political system ever imposed to date on the world's nations. The introduction and foreword to this book go to great extremes to state the case that Communism has killed many more millions and had greater political influence than Nazism ever possessed. Communism is a universal political/social/economic theory that allows it to "metastasize" around the world, adapting itself to any given situation, whereas Nazism was a blunt, in-your-face program of "national egoism." Nazism never gained an international following of any consequence whatsoever, while institutions in America, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere are stacked to the ceiling with people who openly promote Marxist theory and are (or were) members of Communist parties.
Morality, as the Forward insightfully mentions, as understood today derives from political affiliations rather than any of the world's "outdated" metaphysical belief systems. Communism promotes total equality rather than a hierarchy. It is frequently defended by liberal and humanist scholars who believe Communism is a bulwark against "anti-Semitic," "redneck," "neo-Nazi" extremists who are conspiring to exterminate Jews, rape women, enslave Blacks and force homosexuals back "into the closet." These same people have a fondness for the Lower East Side, where the Bolshevik revolutionaries hung out while plotting to overthrow the Tsar before WWI and institute their reign of atheist and Jewish inspired terror.
The people behind the authorship and promotion of this book are rather interesting as well. The seven French authors who researched and compiled the book are left-wing ex-Marxists. Furthermore, _The Black Book_ was translated from French into English and published by Harvard University, not necessarily the most conservative institution.
Rating: 5
Summary: Communism - the bloodiest murder machine of the 20th century
Comment: This book should be in every school library across the country. People must know that Communism, a totalitarian system of government no better than the fascist variety, is largely responsible for making the 20th century the bloodiest in human history. Wherever the followers of Marx were able to grab power, there was repression, terror, torture, mass murder and, in many cases, class-based genocide. I cannot stress how badly this needs to be read, because I've heard far too many "useful idiots" say things such as "I don't really view communism as a bad thing." (Whoppi Goldberg) and "when Communist U.S.S.R. was a superpower, the world was better off." (Janeane Garofalo). I have a feeling that if you walked down the street and asked various people about the Soviet Gulag or Stalin's forced famine in Ukraine, you'd most likely get blank looks, because they have forgotten. This book was written to remind them.
Some (mostly radical Leftists who want you to forget about the bloody history of their favorite ideology) have said that The Black Book is "biased" because it doesn't mention the atrocities of "anti-Communists" such as Pinochet, Suharto, Rios Montt, Somoza and Marcos. True, but this is a history of Communist crimes, the deliberate starvation and wholesale slaughter of *SCORES OF MILLIONS* of people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, etc, which make the crimes of the aforementioned anti-Communists pale in comparison. How many books on Nazi massacres mention Communist atrocities during WWII (Katyn, Bleiburg, Nemmersdorf, Vinnitsa, the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the deportation of ethnic minorities in the USSR, the murderous post-war expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe)? Not many. Does that mean these books on Nazi genocide are "biased" and therefore not credible for failing to mention the misdeeds committed by the other side? I don't believe so. And so what if an "anti-Communist" or a "right-winger" writes about the crimes of Communism? Don't anti-Fascists and Jews write about the evils of Nazism? While you're at Amazon.com, look up a few books on the crimes committed by the Pinochet regime in Chile (the 3,000 "disappeared" Communists and sympathizers we are always hearing about). You'll notice that nearly all of them were written by Marxists and Socialists who are pro-Allende. Perhaps we should discount them altogether?
There is also some controversy over the numbers The Black Book claims to have been killed by Communism. Some say the introduction places the number too high (100 million, which is accepted by The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation). Even some contributors to the book, former Communists who are obviously not ready to completely damn the poisoned ideology of Marxism, have denounced Courtois for inflating the numbers and said they would have settled for a total of 85 million. I have to admit that I also have a problem with one estimate. The introduction places those killed by the Soviet regime from 1917-1991 at only 20 million. Many historians estimate that Stalin ALONE killed 20 million people (Robert Conquest, Daniel Chirot, Adam Hochschild, Tina Rosenberg, Wallechinsky, etc). Alexander Yakovlev, author of the excellent new book on Soviet tyranny and mass murder entitled "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia," places the Soviet death toll at 30-35 million (in my opinion the most reliable estimate). Others, such as 'atrocitologist' R.J. Rummel and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, place the Soviet death toll at a whopping 60 million! Therefore I believe it is safe to say that Communism is indeed responsible for killing *at least* 100 million people in the 20th century, making it one of the greatest evils in the annals of human history.
We must never forget the 100 million.
In addition to this book I would recommend the following:
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander N. Yakovlev
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
Death by Government by R.J. Rummel
Rating: 1
Summary: Bunk
Comment: Many, many statistics and claims are completely (and admittedly) wrong in this book, but HUP refuses to correct them. Mark Kramer, one of the authors, admits to several mistakes, one of which is multiplying death tolls by a factor of at least 10 during translations.
Go to Google, type in "MIM," (for Moaist Internationalist Movement), and find their review. They've kept correspondence with some of the authors and publishers about the mistakes, and have a very in-depth review of the book.
 |
Title: Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679640509 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 04 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
 |
Title: Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik ISBN: 1893554457 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
 |
Title: In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr ISBN: 1893554724 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: Anti-Americanism by Jean Francois Revel, DIARMID CAMMELL ISBN: 1893554856 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0195071328 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1991 List Price(USD): $23.50 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
