Anti-anti-communist antidote

Those who are offended by the condemnations of Communism spurred by the passing of Ronald Reagan, who argue that "evil" is too strong a word for Communism or that the regimes of Mao and Stalin somehow perverted a noble dream should read The Little Black Book of Communism, a book originally published in France and released recently in the United States by Harvard University Press. The authors comb through records of Communist regimes worldwide and come up with these horrifying figures: 25 million deaths in the Soviet Union, 65 million in Maoist China, 2 million in Cambodia, and millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Here's the review from the New Republic:

The Black Book of Communism, which is finally appearing in English, is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. It is a major study that deepens our understanding of communism and poses a philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. The book's central argument, copiously documented and repeated in upwards of a dozen different essays, is that the history of communism should be read above all as the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by cruel dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot, and dozens of imitators) who were murderously drunk on their own ideology and power...Courtois and his collaborators have performed a signal service by gathering in one volume a global history of communism's crimes from the Soviet Union to China, from the satellite countries of Eastern-Europe to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North Korea, and to a lesser degree in Latin America and Africa...The Black Book is enormously impressive and utterly convincing.

The brutality of this story refutes arguments that Communism as practiced was not as evil an Reagan claimed, and its worldwide scope places a heavy burden on those who claim Communism could be done "right." The book makes a mockery of those urged us to accept Communism's place in the world, and confirms Reagan's decision to lead us into battle against it.

- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 9:26 AM