An article by Robert Stacy McCain of The Washington Times - an ostensibly "conservative" weekly - of September 21, 2000, tells us that the "Black Book" has come to America.
Writes McCain:
It caused a sensation when it appeared in France in 1997, but nearly a year after Harvard University Press published an English translation, "The Black Book of Communism" has yet to spark a similar uproar in the United States.
The book - "Livre Noir du Communisme" in French - by six leading left-wing French intellectuals chronicles the murderous tendencies of communist regimes around the world.
Subtitled "Crimes, Terror, Repression," the book cites evidence that 85 million to 100 million people have been killed by communists in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Latin America and Africa.
Zundelsite:
Even if one were to accept as Gospel Truth that Hitler's regime killed six million Jews, he would be a choir boy compared to America's World War II allies when it comes to killings by the millions.
McCain:
"In the 20th century, more citizens were killed by their own governments than by foreign enemies," says Arnold Beichman, research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The bloody record documented in "The Black Book of Communism," he says, shows "that totalitarianism first of all regards its own people as the enemy."
Zundelsite:
Sounds familiar? Many democracies do also, otherwise they would not adopt laws clearly designed to create ill health among their citizens or cause unrest by irresponsible immigration and trade policies.
McCain:
In France, "The Black Book" hit with explosive force. The 856-page volume by Stephane Courtois and his colleagues "instigated an intellectual ruckus," according to one American reviewer. Another reviewer said the book "touched off a storm of controversy."
Zundelsite:
No wonder! France's body politic has been infiltrated from top to bottom by Marxist ideologues. The Communist Party was always a power factor in France.
McCain:
Amid the uproar, the French newspaper Le Monde accused Mr. Courtois of anti-Semitism for daring to compare the crimes of communism to the crimes of Nazism. The book's revelations were fiercely debated throughout Europe.
Zundelsite:
No! The "anti-semitism" accusation stemmed from the fact that many French intellectuals are alert to the many Jewish names associated with Bolshevik murders.
McCain:
And in America?
"It's been very well-reviewed," says George Washington University historian Ron Radosh, "but I don't think it has had any major impact on the intellectual community."
"I don't think it's made a great impression [in the United States], certainly compared to France, where it was a blockbuster book," agrees Richard Pipes of Harvard University.
Zundelsite:
The US political caste has never come to grips with the devastating, murderous impact America's alliance with Stalin had on Central and Eastern European governments and peoples.
McCain:
The difference in the book's reception, historians agree, is that communism was much more influential in France.
"France lived for years by the slogan, 'Pas d'enemies a gauche' -no enemies to the left," says John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress. "What this book showed is that the enemy ***is*** the left. French culture always leaned to the left. . . . This book has exorcised, in my opinion, the demon of gauchism, or leftism."
Zundelsite:
It took French society 80 years to come to this realization. It cost Europe 80 to 100 million lives.
McCain:
"The French have been paying for the French Revolution, which started this whole business," Mr. Beichman says. "You have this fantastic tradition in France of justifying the French Revolution and everything that went with it."
Zundelsite:
Beichman is absolutely right!
McCain:
"France had an enormous communist party," says Mr. Pipes, "so communism in France was a domestic problem, and to some extent still is, whereas in America it was only a problem of foreign policy. Once the Soviet Union collapsed [in 1991], the problem to some extent vanished."
Zundelsite:
Pipes, too, is correct!
McCain:
The revelation that Marxist-Leninist regimes killed tens of millions of their own citizens might be controversial in Europe, but is less shocking to Americans, who have generally opposed communism.
Zundelsite:
That's what made Roosevelt's alliance with Stalin so condemnable!
McCain:
"In this country, the bulk of the population has always been hostile to communism," Mr. Radosh says. "In France, where the mass support for communism has been weakening rapidly, the book spoke to the concerns and fears of a great many more people than it has here."
Zundelsite:
Communism died of its own internal flaws.
McCain:
While "The Black Book" hasn't caused any high-profile controversy in America, it is still a valuable work.
"It's aimed at shoving people's faces in the reality of the millions who were deliberately killed by communist governments," Mr. Haynes says. "It's very difficult for someone who has had sympathy for communism . . . to read about the millions murdered and killed and not have some feeling they should reconsider their views."
Zundelsite:
Better late than never! Don't forget: The last Communists are found in academia and the media - rarely among working people.
McCain:
And communism has not been without sympathizers in the United States.
"While the bulk of the [American] population has been hostile to communism . . . that's not been true of what you might call our intellectual class," Mr. Haynes explains. "Their opinion has been much different."
Zundelsite:
It is because the intellectual class is permeated by Jewish academics. Communism was and is essentially a Jewish brainchild.
McCain:
While relatively few American intellectuals have been openly pro-communist, Mr. Haynes notes, many have been "anti-anticommunist" - regarding anti-communism as a greater threat than communism itself. Others have adopted the "revisionist" view of communism as morally equal to Western democracy.
Zundelsite:
They knew that "Fascism" or "National Socialism" were anti-Communist and thus a threat to their belief system. That's why they turned against these regimes, under the guise of anti-anti-Communism.
McCain:
"Those in the academic, intellectual world who had an anti-anticommunist position, their stance has not generally been one of defending communism, but of averting their eyes to the nature of communist regimes," Mr. Haynes says. "Many of them, I suspect, will avert their eyes from this book. Their initial reaction will probably be one of silence, rather hoping it will go away."
Zundelsite:
They would rather divert attention to Hitler than face the cold fact, which is silent complicity in the murder of millions of people in Stalin's Soviet gulags and elsewhere by Marxist psychopaths.
McCain:
"You can be sure of one thing, that most academics will spurn this book," Mr. Beichman says. "There are more Marxists on the American academic scene than there are in all of Europe."
Zundelsite:
Beichman is remarkably honest and astute.
McCain:
While the defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent trials of war criminals exposed the evils of the Holocaust, Mr. Radosh notes, the collapse of the Soviet Union "has not had the impact that our understanding of fascism did in the years after World War II. Everybody is anti-fascist, but not everybody is anti-communist."
Zundelsite:
And don't we know why! Those in positions of influence have by omission or commission prevented the crimes of Communism to be exposed to the American people.
McCain:
Mr. Pipes agrees: "Everyone is aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but the atrocities committed by the communists have been ignored or downplayed."
Zundelsite:
Pipes is right on target!
McCain:
Public reaction to Elian Gonzales - the boy who was sent back to Cuba after surviving his mother's attempt to escape Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship - illustrates the difference, Mr. Radosh says. Most Americans thought Elian was "being sent back to a nice Caribbean nation . . . a decent place with a different system that is no better or worse than ours," says Mr. Radosh. "The Black Book" documents that, among other atrocities, Cuban communists executed more than 1,000 "counterrevolutionaries" during their first year in power.
Zundelsite:
That's really whitewashing Castro's brutal record!
McCain:
No communist regime has been more murderous than the People's Republic of China. According to "The Black Book," Mao Tse-tung and his followers have slaughtered or starved to death an estimated 65 million Chinese since 1949. The "perhaps 1,000" killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were insignificant compared to the estimated 20 million to 43 million Chinese who died in the 1959-61 famine caused by Mao's "Great Leap Forward," according to Jean-Louis Margolin's contribution to "The Black Book."
Zundelsite:
And yet Red China is wooed by the powers that be in Washington!
McCain:
"The Black Book" details the enormous scale of communist mass murder - from the 1922 Russian famine instigated by Vladimir Lenin that killed 5 million, to dictator Pol Pot's wholesale extermination of more than a million Cambodians in the 1970s.
Zundelsite:
Five million?! Come on! How about the exiling, the kulak starvation, the forced collectivization of later years?
McCain:
While communism "now is pretty much dead, there is no assurance it will not revive," warns Mr. Pipes. Some people may believe, he says, that communism failed because "it was tried in the wrong country and mistakes were made - that the idea is a good one and we should try again."
Zundelsite:
That's generally the line taken by Marxist intellectuals everywhere! Amazing but true!
McCain:
Given the horrors chronicled in "The Black Book," Mr. Pipes thinks otherwise: "It's not a good idea that went wrong, but it's a bad idea."
Zundelsite:
It was and is a bad idea that was kept alive by England and America allying itself with it - otherwise Hitler Germany would have wrestled the Evil Empire to the ground. Whatever ails Western civilization today is a direct consequence of that unholy, demonic alliance.
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Thought for the Day:
"If the Germans (collectively) are held accountable for the "Holocaust", then it is only just and fitting that the Jews (collectively) be held responsible for all the ills caused by their creation: communism; not only in the past, but in the future also."
(Letter to the Zundelsite)
Back to Table of Contents of the Sept. 2000 ZGrams