Daniel J Flynn

When searching for examples of state-sponsored barbarities, intellectuals are quick to point to the Spanish Inquisition or its Protestant imitation, the Witchhunt. How could anyone, modern academics wonder, persecute another for their beliefs? These same intellectuals, ironically, are often the very people who served as cheerleaders for political persecution and mass murder on a scale unmatched in human history.

The Spanish Inquisition claimed slightly more than 2,000 lives during its 25-year apex between 1480 and 1505. One would be hard pressed to find any 25-day period in Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, or Cambodia under Pol Pot in which the killing was that slight. Yet it is a Torquemada or Salem that is equated with homicidal intolerance. The crimes of Communism are ignored. Being generous, one might suppose that intellectuals are simply blinded by the prejudices of our age and are unable to detach themselves and see the killing that has occurred right under their noses. A more cynical perspective might view their amnesia as a self-induced condition brought on as a method to absolve themselves of their own role in supporting murder.

In contemplating the deafening silence among intellectuals that has greeted the killing of 100 million people by Communism this century, The Black Book of Communism's co-author Stephane Courtois wonders, "Why has it been necessary to wait until the end of the twentieth century for this subject to show up on the radar screen?" The answer, it seems, is that academics have been engaged in "ideologically motivated self-deception" for more than 80 years, refusing to believe that their ideological cousins could be capable of such diabolical crimes.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, published by Harvard University Press, is the work of eleven scholars that ignited a continental firestorm when it first hit bookstores in France in 1997. The authors estimate the century's death toll at the hands of Communist governments (excluding wars) at 100 million people. Country by country, deaths by the state in China stand at 65 million, in the USSR 20 million, Vietnam 1 million, North Korea 2 million, Cambodia 2 million, Eastern Europe 1 million, Latin America 150,000, Africa 1.7 million, and Afghanistan 1.5 million. Additionally, the international Communist movement murdered about 10,000 people throughout the world.

An historical work of landmark importance, The Black Book of Communism obliterates any pretensions that Communism was an inherently good ideology that was occasionally perverted by a corrupt leader, e.g., Stalin. Through previously unavailable Communist archives and past scholarship, the book meticulously documents, as its subtitle suggests, the crimes,terror and represion that existed in the Communist world. For the many supporters of Communism within academia, this is a bitter pill to swallow.

Despite the irrefutability of its main thesis, there is plenty within its pages to argue about. The figure of 20 million deaths in the Soviet Union is far smaller than past credible estimates; 65 million deaths-by-government for China is slightly higher than the previous high estimate. The omission of Ghana, for instance, is all the more glaring due to the book's painstaking thoroughness. Forced abortion in China is scarcely mentioned. The infamous "Bloodbath" in North Vietnam is omitted and thus seemingly denied. Any book that is more than 700 pages (not counting footnotes), however, will leave room for ample criticism.

Workers' Paradise

"All power to the workers—for the Communist reconstruction of society." —The Communist, November 29, 1919

From the beginning, Lenin and his Soviet regime made it quite clear that rather than seeking to liberate workers, they sought to enslave them. Co-author Nicolas Werth conveys that the first action of the Soviet police force, the Cheka, was to forcibly stop a strike in Petrograd. The punishment for workers that attempted to strike in the Soviet Union, as it was in many other Communist countries, was often death. "The best place for strikers, those yellow noxious parasites, is the concentration camp!" Pravda announced in February of 1920. "When the prisons were full" in the early months of 1919, The Black Book of Communism points out, "strikers were loaded on barges and then thrown by the hundreds into the Volga with stones around their necks. From 12 to 14 March between 2,000 and 4,000 strikers were shot or drowned."

"In the workplace the date of 26 June 1940," Werth writes, "remained imprinted on the minds of many because of the decree ‘on the adoption of the eight-hour working day, the seven-day working week, and the ban on leaving work on one's own accord.'" Henceforth, those late for work or deemed slacking were subject to imprisonment. The situation left one Russian to remark, "When Hitler takes our towns, he will put up posters saying, ‘I won't put workers on trial, like your government does, just because they are twenty-one minutes late for work."

Yet many Westerners still deluded themselves into labeling the Soviet Union "a workers' paradise."

Atheism: The State Religion

"One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of [religion]. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it."
—W.E.B. Du Bois

"The more representatives from the reactionary clergy and the recalcitrant bourgeoisie we shoot," Lenin wrote in March of 1922, "the better it will be for us. We must teach these people a lesson as quickly as possible, so that the thought of protesting again doesn't occur to them for decades to come." When Lenin and his progeny were unable to teach the clergy a lesson, they simply murdered them. In 1922 alone, more than 8,000 priests, monks, and nuns were executed in the Soviet Union. Nearly a decade after the Revolution, however, 20,000 churches and mosques were still in operation. By 1941, that number shrank to less than 1,000. "In October of 1929 the seizure of all church bells was ordered because ‘the sound of bells disturbs the right of peace of the vast majority of atheists in the towns and countryside,'"

Werth points out.

Elsewhere, Communist leaders followed the anti-religious blueprint of Marx and Lenin. In 1967, Albania declared itself the world's first officially atheist nation and reduced more than 2,000 churches and mosques to rubble or expropriated them for state use. Almost fifty percent of all Catholics were killed in Cambodia, the highest fatality percentage for any demographic group. Moslems saw more than 40% of their co-religionists killed. Mosques and The Koran were burned and Pol Pot's henchmen sadistically forced followers of Islam to eat pork. In Romania, Communist persecution of Christians took on a sinister nature that eclipsed the practices of the Romans. The Romanian Secret Police encouraged prisoners to devise "reeducation" programs. The leader of one such program named "Eugen Turcanu devised especially diabolical measures to force seminarians to renounce their faith," co-author Karel Bartosek reports. "Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite." Bartosek continues:

Turcanu also forced the seminarians to take part in black masses that he orchestrated himself, particularly during holy week and on Good Friday. Some of the reeducators played the part of choirboys; others masqueraded as priests. Turcanu's liturgy was extremely pornographic, and he rephrased the original in a demonic fashion. The Virgin Mary was called "the Great Whore," and Jesus, "that cunt who died on the cross." One seminarian undergoing reeducation and playing the role of a priest had to undress completely and was then wrapped in a robe stained with excrement. Around his neck was hung a phallus made of bread and soap powdered with DDT. In 1950, on the Saturday before Easter, the students who were undergoing reeducation were forced to pass before the priest, kiss the phallus, and say, "He is risen."

Communist ‘Science'

"The cornerstone of the Marxist State is the utilization of human knowledge, science and technique, directly for human welfare."

In China, Communist "science" applied to everyday practices had perhaps the most disastrous results in the Marxist world. "Mao had proclaimed his belief that ‘in company grain grows fast; seeds are happiest when growing together'—attempting to impose class solidarity on nature. Accordingly, seeds were sown at five to ten times the normal density, with the result that millions of young plants died." Mao's idiotic projection of Marxist theories onto agriculture—strikingly similar to the bizarre practice of American academics to base Anthropology, English, and Sociology courses on Marx—was a major cause of the greatest famine in the history of mankind. Scientists in the Soviet Union who rejected the ridiculous biology of Trofim Lysenko (he rejected genetics, among other things), and the "science" of other officially endorsed scholars, were sent to the Gulag. Debate, the right to question, peer review—all essential for science to prosper—were banned.

Nowhere was Communism so dehumanizing and utterly unscientific as it was in Cambodia under Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. People wearing glasses were immediately shot, black colored clothing was deemed the official uniform of the country, and money was abolished within a few days. "We all lived in an enormous concentration camp," one Cambodian observed. In North Korea, co-author Pierre Rigoulot observes, midgets are targeted for eradication. "Kim Jong Il himself has said that ‘the race of dwarves must disappear.'"

Terror as State Policy

"For the first time I have been completely happy…while here one can forget the evil in the rest of the world."
—Victor Gollancz in the USSR, 1937

In addition to mass killings, a common denominator within Communist nations was the horrifying and barbaric ways in which people were killed. Cannibalism, resorted to by starving people in the Communist world, was also employed by oppressors to inspire terror in the populace. Co-author Jean-Louis Margolin describes the mutilation of body parts in China, in which "Sometimes the pieces were cooked and eaten, or force-fed to members of the victim's family who were still alive and looking on." Cambodian "Ly Heng tells of a Khmer Rouge deserter who was forced to eat his own ears before being killed," Margolin notes.

Terror reigned everywhere Communism went because it is impossible to implement a philosophy so impractical without force and The Cambodian killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. intimidation. Marxists, convinced of the rectitude of their ideology, had no problem sacrificing millions of people if the end result was the triumph of socialism. An idea mattered more than people. As the director of an Afghan Communist prison repeatedly said, "We'll only leave 1 million Afghans alive—that's all we'll need to build socialism." There is another perhaps more significant reason that terror was state policy in every Communist nation, and that is because it is an integral part of Marxism.

The authors dissent. They exonerate Marx for the crimes his followers carried out in what is perhaps the book's greatest flaw. What, then, do they say is at fault? The same ideas that inspired the Nazis! "The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps not to be found in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism," the book's conclusion professes, "applied to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such ideas are applied to racial issues."

For men of the Left, which the eleven authors all are, it is often difficult to identify anything as evil unless it is in some way made to appear to be related to racism, or its human embodiment, Adolph Hitler. This reductio ad hitlerum method of analysis blinds its practitioners from seeing the nefarious disposition of any movement claiming a belief in "equality" or an enmity toward "oppression." Thus, the only bad things about Stalin that come to the mind of one who suffers from this affliction is that he made a pact with Hitler, he conducted a paranoid campaign against a group of Jewish doctors, or that he persecuted the Ukrainian minority. Stalin's murder of tens of millions of his fellow countrymen for reasons unrelated to ethnic animosity somehow don't even spark concern.

Likewise, the tens of thousands of Cubans who have drowned attempting to escape their island-prison have gone unnoticed in intellectual circles. It is only when Castro quarantined AIDS sufferers that elites condemned him. More than 60 million deaths were caused by the Chinese Communists without a hint of protest from left-wing activists before they stumbled upon the fact that the Middle Kingdom was persecuting the Tibetan minority and erasing their culture.

Although the authors don't suffer from a full-blown version of this malady—they did, after all, publish the most exhaustive study of Communism's crimes—they are nevertheless affected by it.
A government confiscating property and dictating all aspects of life—socialism—is still a noble idea, the authors argue; the Communists just didn't understand Marx. What didn't they understand? Marx's call for constant revolution? The Communist Manifesto's counsel to eliminate the wealthy? His demand that religion be abolished? Unfortunately, as their book documents all too thoroughly, the Communists understood him too well.