The Black Book Of Communism

[napoleon solo]

i have heard many things about this book.

Can anyone tell me about it, who wrote it, when, what's it about, and your opinion of it.

[Poop]

I haven't read it, but a simple Yahoo search revealed that it was written by Stephane Courtois, Mark Kramer, Jonathan Murphy, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin.

From Amazon.com:
Book Description
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.http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067...7478380-3008050 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674076087/002-7478380-3008050)

[napoleon solo]

i know, but i wanted to see what everyones opinion was on it, is it worth reading?

[Poop]

I don't know what harm could come from reading it.

[ComradeRed]

Those "scholars" who wrote the thing must not be that knowledgeable on leftism to clump all forms of leftism(save anarchism) is communism.

[Hiero]

Sound like a heap of shit. A book written, funded and printed by a group of capitalist and religous folk.

[Guest1]

"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."

I don't see any reason to read it. Sounds like a fucking waste of time, like something Fox News could have come up with.

[Poop]

Have "terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres" not taken place in Marxist dictatorships over the last 87 years?

[YKTMX]

The editing on the book was so zealous and stupid (i.e claiming that Communism and Nazism are moral equvalents) that even most of the contributors distance themselves from it.

The book was written not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the capitalist ideologues were at their most smug and self-congratulatory. It is basically an attempt to say that not only did "communism" kill 100 million (or whatever the number they came up with) but that "social revolution" itself can only lead in tyranny.

Many of the contributors were repentant Stalinists trying to make their way back into the bourgeois mainstream. It has some purpose in that it tells us some of the real crimes of Stalinism but it is of little real value to socialists because it seeks to show that revolution itself is the problem and liberal capitalism is "inevitable".

I would never tell anybody not to read any book, but just keep a clear head while going through it. You should maybe read a socialist book on Stalinism before attempting this - that is my suggestion anyway.

[YKTMX]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2004, 03:48 PM
Have "terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres" not taken place in Marxist dictatorships over the last 87 years?
Two things in response to this:

1) The regimes in Eastern Europe and China were in NO WAY Marxist. Forget what you've been told from both the Stalinists and Right-wingers. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of the society Marx, Engels, Lenin etc enviseged would be able to tell you that these societies were not it.

2) Anything the "Communist" socieites learned about "terror", "mass deportation" etc they learned from the British and the Americans. The actions of the Brits in India and the American treatment of the Native Americans will show you that tyranny didn't start in the Soviet Union. It had been perfected and practiced by the capitalist power well before then.

[New Tolerance]

Prehaps we should compile a Black Book of Capitalism...

[h&s]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2004, 03:48 PM
Have "terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres" not taken place in Marxist dictatorships over the last 87 years?
A 'Marxist Dictatorship' is a contradiction in terms.

[Porco Rosso]

Originally posted by New [email protected] 7 2004, 07:35 PM
Prehaps we should compile a Black Book of Capitalism...
That would be far, far too long.

[DaCuBaN]

Prehaps we should compile a Black Book of Capitalism...

I do like the principle, but I also like my blood in my veins. Don't make me read that book... :ph34r:

I haven&#39;t read the "Black Book of Communism", and to be honest I&#39;m going to take a wide berth of it - It sounds both infuriating and thoroughly depressing. People suck <_<

[Severian]

Originally posted by New [email protected] 7 2004, 01:35 PM
Prehaps we should compile a Black Book of Capitalism...
There is actually a book by that name.

As for "The Black Book of Communism", it&#39;s numbers are largely BS - even the better scholars among its contributors have said so - and its premise is even bigger BS, lumping revolution together with counterrevolutionary terror.

[Freedom Writer]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2004, 05:03 PM
There is actually a book by that name.

For what I know, Chomsky has a lot of great criticism of capitalism, right?

[Poop]

Originally posted by hammer&[email protected] 8 2004, 11:55 AM
A &#39;Marxist Dictatorship&#39; is a contradiction in terms.
Didn&#39;t Marx advocate dictatorship (DoP)?

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Aye, there are much better, more reasoned, critiques of the brutality of state-capitalist regimes.
From the excerpts I&#39;ve read, the Black Book Of Communism seems to be little more than paranoid reactionary propaganda.


Chomsky and Deep Grammer came up in my philosophy class today. True story.

[Poop]

Originally posted by Earp
For what I know, Chomsky has a lot of great criticism of capitalism, right?
Yes, lots of people do.

[Monty Cantsin]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2004, 08:04 PM
Didn&#39;t Marx advocate dictatorship (DoP)?
yes but there talking about class dictatorship, Marx talked of Capitalism as a dictatorship also.

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2004, 08:04 PM
Didn&#39;t Marx advocate dictatorship (DoP)?
The use of the word "dictatorship" is to represent the rule of the proletariat over the bourgeois class.

It&#39;s similarity to an actual single figure dictatorship ends there.

The first rule of understanding communism is to reject all forms of bourgeois class society, including bourgeois definitions to bourgeois words.