The Black Book of Communism

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 13, 2000 | by Robert Stacy McCain

It caused a sensation when it appeared in France, but nearly one year after its English translation, The Black Book of Communism has yet to spark an uproar in the United States.

First published in 1997 by six leading left-wing French intellectuals, Livre Noir du Communisme 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.

"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 proves "that totalitarianism first of all regards its own people as the enemy."

Published in the United States as The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, $37, 856 pp), the book details the enormous scale of communist mass murder -- from the 1922 Russian famine instigated by Vladimir Lenin that killed 5 million to the wholesale extermination of more than 1 million Cambodians by Pol Pot in the 1970s. No communist regime has been more murderous than the People's Republic of China, however. 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."

While such figures have had little impact here, Livre Noir du Communisme rocked France. The 856-page volume "instigated an intellectual ruckus," according to one reviewer, and "touched off a storm of controversy," according to another. Amid the uproar, the French newspaper Le Monde accused one of the French authors of anti-Semitism for daring to compare the crimes of communism to the crimes of Nazism.

And in the United States? "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."

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'nemies 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."

While The Black Book hasn't caused much controversy in this country, 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," 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."

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," Haynes explains. "Their opinion has been much different." Though few few American intellectuals have been openly pro-communist, many have been "anti-anticommunist," regarding anticommunism as a greater threat than communism itself. Others have adopted the "revisionist" view of communism as morally equal to Western democracy.

"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," 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."

While the defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent trials of war criminals exposed the evils of the Holocaust, 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 antifascist, but not everybody is anticommunist." Harvard University historian Richard Pipes makes the same point: "Everyone is aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but the atrocities committed by the communists have been ignored or downplayed," he says.

While communism "now is pretty much dead, there is no assurance it will not revive," warns Pipes. Some people may believe that communism failed, Pipes says, because "it was tried in the wrong country and mistakes were made, that the idea is a good one and we should try again." Given the horrors chronicled in The Black Book, Pipes thinks otherwise: "It's not a good idea that went wrong, but it's a bad idea."