Excerpts of "The Black Book of Communism"

 

Pertinent quotes from the best-selling book 

"The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression":

[by several European academics and edited by Stéphane Courtois]

“To be sure, the [communistic] model was applied differently in different cultural settings. As Margolin points out, the chief agent of repression in Russia was a specially created political police, the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-KGB, while in China it was the People's Liberation Army, and in Cambodia it was gun-toting adolescents from the countryside: thus popular ideological mobilization went deeper in Asia than in Russia.

Still, everywhere the aim was to repress "enemies of the people" — "like noxious insects," as Lenin said early on, thus inaugurating Communism's "animalization" of its adversaries. Moreover, the line of inheritance from Stalin, to Mao, to Ho, to  Kim II Sung, to Pol Pot was quite clear, with each new leader receiving both material aid and ideological inspiration from his predecessor.”

[Editor Stéphane Courtois asserts that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". He cites a death toll which totals 94 million, not counting the "excess deaths"

(decrease of the population due to lower than-expected birth rates). Deaths given by Courtois is as follows]

“It is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian population. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes: 

Deaths due to Communism Country Name Number of Deaths U.S.S.R. 20 million China 65 million Vietnam 1 million North Korea 2 million Cambodia 2 million Eastern Europe 1 million Latin America 150,000 Africa 1.7 million Afghanistan 1.5 million

The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths.

The total approaches 100 million people killed.

The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years, engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread famine, of about one-fourth of the country's total population.

However, China's experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and "politically correct" mass slaughter.”

“And the less familiar figures in Margolin's chapter in "China: A Long March into Night" are even more staggering: at a minimum, 10 million "direct victims"; probably 20 million deaths out of the multitudes that passed through China's "hidden Gulag," the laogai; more than 20 million deaths from the "political famine" of the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961, the largest famine in history.”

“During Mao's Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ultimately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does it compare with the mass murder of human beings — of men, women, and children?”

"The book's second point is that there never was a benign, initial phase of Communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track."

[The Black Book of Communism received praise in a number of publications in the United States and Britain, including the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The New Republic, National Review and The Weekly Standard   ]

[Customer's Review]

Estimations may vary, but a rape is a rape:

By C. Yu "chineseboy"

 

209 of 221 people found the following review helpful here:

Many people who do not like this book attacked that the statistics or estimations are inflated. Take Cambodia as an example. I visited S21 a few years ago. Some said 2 millions were killed by Pol Pot, some said 1.7 millions. Some Chinese scholars estimated that 80 millions died of non-natural causes under Mao's rule; 50 millions were killed or oppressed to death during the Cultural Revolution alone. But some people dispute these figures. Let's say we give the preceding estimations a 90% "discount" : Only 20 thousands (= 2 millions X 10%) were massacred by Pol Pot and only 8 millions (80 millions X 10%) by Mao. But, these "discounted" figures are still horrible! The only way to explain "away" these crimes is to argue that anti-right movement, Great leap forward, cultural revolution, Gulag, S21... and many others never happen.

If a girl was raped by a gang, it doesn't matter whether she was raped 5 times or 50 times. The only way to dismiss the case is to say that the girl is a liar. But, I am not a lair. And many Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians... who experienced the suffering are not liars. Unlike some anti-Capitalist or anti-American critics who are enjoying luxury and freedom in the Capitalist America, those people who speak the truth spent many years in jail or lost virtually everything, including their home. 

I keep remembering in 1989 right after June 4, my parents told me not to come home... Please don't just focus on quantitative methodology (numbers). Numbers alone cannot tell the whole story.

The speculation is that all these statistics are still conservative. The true horrors are quickly covered up and forgotten as people try to live and hope for a brighter future - they don't want to dwell on such suffering and horror.

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