Scan barcode
knightofswords's review
2.0
Mein Gott, *sniff* thish ish pure ideology, and so on, and on, and on
Writing a book full of sloppy and half-assed research will only get you attention from the worst media and political figures in the English-speaking world, so I'm not surprised that this book-like object has become their totem.
Read Robert Conquest if you're looking for a good overview of Soviet era crimes from a right leaning perspective - he at least knows how to properly research.
Writing a book full of sloppy and half-assed research will only get you attention from the worst media and political figures in the English-speaking world, so I'm not surprised that this book-like object has become their totem.
Read Robert Conquest if you're looking for a good overview of Soviet era crimes from a right leaning perspective - he at least knows how to properly research.
rotorguy64's review against another edition
5.0
If you want a comprehensive, but still detailed overview of the atrocities committed by Marx' late followers, this is the book for you. It covers the Soviet Union, Red China, the various communist states in Europe, in Asia, Africa, and South America, the Spanish Civil War, pretty much every country you can think of as well as some that most readers don't have on their radar, like Laos or Angola. The various crimes are recorded in meticulous detail, too. Dates, localities, names and death tolls are given, primary sources are translated and incorporated into the text. Large-scale massacres are mentioned, but also the individual tragedies that give a face to the victims, which prevents the book from becoming a stale statistical account. We find out, for example, about a Bulgarian mother that returned home after a visit to a police station, with totally ruined clothes, who attempted suicide three times afterwards and had to be taken care of by her children for the rest of her life. No one knows what happened to her. There are dozens such stories scattered throughout the book, and we know there are millions of others that are hidden in the statistics, or that never entered them. So one of the great achievements of this book is that it maintains the human dimension of the catastrophes it describes.
It should go without mention that the book is bleak and not for the faint of heart, and too lengthy, exhausting and bloody for casual readers. That aside, it's quite easy to get into. You don't need a detailed knowledge of the political or academic landscape of the communist bloc or of their various histories to make sense of the narrative and the facts.
Don't expect biographies of various dear leaders, resistance fighters, or of academicians. Those aren't given the spotlight, I actually can't remember one that spanned for a page or more, not even for Lenin, Stalin or Mao. You also shouldn't expect too thorough a discussion about communism as an academic movement. I don't think there was a chapter describing Marxist theory in detail, or the changes it underwent with Lenin or Mao, or its reception in the western world. There are still some very illuminating discussions here and there, however. According to this book, Russia has a history of bloody and excessively cruel revolt, and the Russian communists owed much to Nechayev; China has a history of perfect authoritarianism inspired by Confucius and interspersed with rebellions inspired by Taoism, often featuring ritual cannibalism; and that the Cambodian mindset of thinking things through to their logical conclusion without checking them against reality, and its lack of a comparable history of rebellion against the authorities, played a major role in the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. These interpretations were interesting and sounded plausible, allthough I don't know how true they are.
To me, communism strikes me as a kind of Anti-Church, the constant infighting as the struggle of various groups for the Marxist Magisterium, and the various purges as the equivalent of the suppression of heresies. The book facilitates such an understanding, but it doesn't put it quite as radically as I have, and not all the authors touch on this topic. Soviet Russia and Maoist China were the centers of this Anti-Church, and while they were remarkably similar given the cultural differences between Russia and China, they still established two distinct communist traditions.
While the book is sometimes accused of lacking academic rigour, I have yet to seen this claim get substantiated. It has well over a thousand footnotes, it should be easy for a determined reader to figure out if they systematically ignored texts that contradicted their thesis, or if they misinterpreted their sources, or if certain claims weren't supported by a source. I have seen nothing of the sort. The most substantial criticisms concern the exact figures cited, and the production process. Concerning the former, I can say that the numbers don't seem outlandish at all, compared with those cited by other researchers. One particular criticism was that the Great Famine killed only fifteen million people, which I guess is alright, and not around fourty million, which would be horrendous. The latter figure is also cited in [b:Tombstone|13538825|Tombstone The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962|Yang Jisheng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344317131l/13538825._SX50_.jpg|19101176], I believe, and I doubt any scholar has done better research on this event than Yang Jisheng. He also discusses the lower figures in considerable detail. I can't reproduce these discussions, but then it seems no one on the left can, either. Concerning the production process, there has been some controversy on Stéphane Courtois' editing and the communication with the other researchers, although I couldn't find that this had any effect on the contents of the book.
There are some other objections, but interestingly, they all boil down to communists objecting to the subject matter itself, for various reasons:
Why aren't the authors discussing the crimes of the Nazis? Because they weren't relevant, given the subject matter. That apologists still complain there isn't a chapter on the Holocaust shows that they simply object to the subject matter itself. They don't want the spotlight shining on communism, for obvious reasons. At the very least, you have to bring in the Nazis and talk of how Stalin defeated them and thus defended Europe from a thousand-year tyranny under Hitler. Just don't frame it as two gang leaders taking over Poland and then arguing over who owns the rest of the street, pretty please, that would be imperialist revisionism.
In the same vein, why aren't the crimes of capitalism, or colonianism, discussed? Again, because they're not relevant to the subject matter. The Marxist dogmatists won't like to hear this, but the eternal conflict between the ruling capitalist world order and the global worker's movement is not integral to how non-Marxists see the world. You can tell the story of the Russian Civil War without telling the story of the Iraq War, or even the story of the Cuban Independence War. That's not leaving details out of the story, it's not falsifying the story. It certainly doesn't mean giving "capitalism" a free pass while focusing on the well-intentioned, if occasionally misguided struggle of the communists against it. The Kulaks, the Trotskyists, or the Cham and Viet in Cambodia weren't participants in such a cosmic conflict, unless you've overdosed on Marxist literature.
Lastly, why aren't the good sides of communism discussed? Rising literacy rates, worker's rights, the liberation of women and homosexuals, economic and social equality, environmental protection, why is none of that mentioned? Perhaps because the one-hundred million dead people overshadow it somewhat, but that's just my guess. As importantly, because the track record of the communist countries isn't really that impressive, all things considered. From drying up the Aral Sea to x-raying workers to death, they consistently failed to achieve what they preached. Even the impressive literacy rates aren't that impressive when you consider that the libraries of a state like Albania were still filled with endless volumes from the same guy, [b:as Theodore Dalrymple described|18683439|The Wilder Shores of Marx Journeys in a Vanishing World|Theodore Dalrymple|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381961313l/18683439._SY75_.jpg|26522659].
All in all, a very good book, and definitely one that more people should read.
It should go without mention that the book is bleak and not for the faint of heart, and too lengthy, exhausting and bloody for casual readers. That aside, it's quite easy to get into. You don't need a detailed knowledge of the political or academic landscape of the communist bloc or of their various histories to make sense of the narrative and the facts.
Don't expect biographies of various dear leaders, resistance fighters, or of academicians. Those aren't given the spotlight, I actually can't remember one that spanned for a page or more, not even for Lenin, Stalin or Mao. You also shouldn't expect too thorough a discussion about communism as an academic movement. I don't think there was a chapter describing Marxist theory in detail, or the changes it underwent with Lenin or Mao, or its reception in the western world. There are still some very illuminating discussions here and there, however. According to this book, Russia has a history of bloody and excessively cruel revolt, and the Russian communists owed much to Nechayev; China has a history of perfect authoritarianism inspired by Confucius and interspersed with rebellions inspired by Taoism, often featuring ritual cannibalism; and that the Cambodian mindset of thinking things through to their logical conclusion without checking them against reality, and its lack of a comparable history of rebellion against the authorities, played a major role in the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. These interpretations were interesting and sounded plausible, allthough I don't know how true they are.
To me, communism strikes me as a kind of Anti-Church, the constant infighting as the struggle of various groups for the Marxist Magisterium, and the various purges as the equivalent of the suppression of heresies. The book facilitates such an understanding, but it doesn't put it quite as radically as I have, and not all the authors touch on this topic. Soviet Russia and Maoist China were the centers of this Anti-Church, and while they were remarkably similar given the cultural differences between Russia and China, they still established two distinct communist traditions.
While the book is sometimes accused of lacking academic rigour, I have yet to seen this claim get substantiated. It has well over a thousand footnotes, it should be easy for a determined reader to figure out if they systematically ignored texts that contradicted their thesis, or if they misinterpreted their sources, or if certain claims weren't supported by a source. I have seen nothing of the sort. The most substantial criticisms concern the exact figures cited, and the production process. Concerning the former, I can say that the numbers don't seem outlandish at all, compared with those cited by other researchers. One particular criticism was that the Great Famine killed only fifteen million people, which I guess is alright, and not around fourty million, which would be horrendous. The latter figure is also cited in [b:Tombstone|13538825|Tombstone The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962|Yang Jisheng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344317131l/13538825._SX50_.jpg|19101176], I believe, and I doubt any scholar has done better research on this event than Yang Jisheng. He also discusses the lower figures in considerable detail. I can't reproduce these discussions, but then it seems no one on the left can, either. Concerning the production process, there has been some controversy on Stéphane Courtois' editing and the communication with the other researchers, although I couldn't find that this had any effect on the contents of the book.
There are some other objections, but interestingly, they all boil down to communists objecting to the subject matter itself, for various reasons:
Why aren't the authors discussing the crimes of the Nazis? Because they weren't relevant, given the subject matter. That apologists still complain there isn't a chapter on the Holocaust shows that they simply object to the subject matter itself. They don't want the spotlight shining on communism, for obvious reasons. At the very least, you have to bring in the Nazis and talk of how Stalin defeated them and thus defended Europe from a thousand-year tyranny under Hitler. Just don't frame it as two gang leaders taking over Poland and then arguing over who owns the rest of the street, pretty please, that would be imperialist revisionism.
In the same vein, why aren't the crimes of capitalism, or colonianism, discussed? Again, because they're not relevant to the subject matter. The Marxist dogmatists won't like to hear this, but the eternal conflict between the ruling capitalist world order and the global worker's movement is not integral to how non-Marxists see the world. You can tell the story of the Russian Civil War without telling the story of the Iraq War, or even the story of the Cuban Independence War. That's not leaving details out of the story, it's not falsifying the story. It certainly doesn't mean giving "capitalism" a free pass while focusing on the well-intentioned, if occasionally misguided struggle of the communists against it. The Kulaks, the Trotskyists, or the Cham and Viet in Cambodia weren't participants in such a cosmic conflict, unless you've overdosed on Marxist literature.
Lastly, why aren't the good sides of communism discussed? Rising literacy rates, worker's rights, the liberation of women and homosexuals, economic and social equality, environmental protection, why is none of that mentioned? Perhaps because the one-hundred million dead people overshadow it somewhat, but that's just my guess. As importantly, because the track record of the communist countries isn't really that impressive, all things considered. From drying up the Aral Sea to x-raying workers to death, they consistently failed to achieve what they preached. Even the impressive literacy rates aren't that impressive when you consider that the libraries of a state like Albania were still filled with endless volumes from the same guy, [b:as Theodore Dalrymple described|18683439|The Wilder Shores of Marx Journeys in a Vanishing World|Theodore Dalrymple|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381961313l/18683439._SY75_.jpg|26522659].
All in all, a very good book, and definitely one that more people should read.
mwfrendauthor's review
5.0
Staggering. It makes you ashamed to call these totalitarian monsters human. The mass murder on a scale that is hard to imagine, occurred only a few decades ago, and the remnants of those regimes are in some cases still in power.
Aside from the damning indictments on the perpetrators, one is compelled to ask what kind of culture is behind the genocide of tens of millions in Russian and China? What is the mentality of the people who suffer through it, without rising up in armed rebellion against it? What does this say about human evolution? Have those cultures lost their will to be free?
Aside from the damning indictments on the perpetrators, one is compelled to ask what kind of culture is behind the genocide of tens of millions in Russian and China? What is the mentality of the people who suffer through it, without rising up in armed rebellion against it? What does this say about human evolution? Have those cultures lost their will to be free?
lord_tyronisis's review
5.0
This book should be required reading. The crimes of Communism are woefully forgotten, to the point where many Americans unironically support socialism.
Every page is a nightmare which is certainly strange praise.
Anyone who supports communism in 2020 is either ignorant, evil, or both.
Every page is a nightmare which is certainly strange praise.
Anyone who supports communism in 2020 is either ignorant, evil, or both.
robsonjv's review
4.0
Not the easiest read, but it confirms that the billions spent to oppose Communism globally were well worth it. Alleged intellectuals who differentiate Communism in theory from its real-world practice everywhere, or who believe there was any moral equivalence between the West and Communism can no longer pretend they have a leg to stand on.
More...