[4 Nov 1999] When the Killing Stopped

From the Laissez Faire Books catalog

November 1999

"The likelihood of Steven Spielberg ever making a film about the Cheka killing Cossack girls with sledgehammers is remote indeed. Marxism will never have a Holocaust chained to its ankles because those 65 million corpses in China never made it to the screen. The iconic is indeed, alas, more powerful than the ironic."

--from a review by Lawrence Osborne

Worst Crimes of the Millennium

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin et al

Reviewed by JIM POWELL

This shocking book, the result of new research into communist archives, goes beyond anything you have read on the evils of political power. It tells how communist regimes committed the worst crimes of the millennium, murdering over 100 million people--4 times more than the Nazis. Neither the communists nor their apologists ever admitted the enormity of these crimes. That's why the original edition of the book caused a firestorm of controversy when it was published in Europe.

The authors cover "The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920, the murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930, the liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38, the deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-32, the destruction of 6 million Ukrainians by means of an artificial and systematically perpetrated famine in 1932-33, the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldavans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45, the deportation of Volga Germans in 1941, the wholesale deportation of Chechens in 1944, the wholesale deportation and extermination of the urban population of Cambodia from 1973 to 1978, the slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950." Then the authors document 20 million murders in Communist China, as many as 40 million deaths from the Chinese communist famine, plus torture and murder in Poland, Hungary, North Korea, Cuba, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and elsewhere.

The book documents every imaginable kind of agonizing torture which communists inflicted on men, women and children. Lest you wonder whether such documentation is really needed, just look at the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which calls Lenin "the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker"--while neglecting to mention that he ordered several hundred thousand executions, he caused a famine resulting in 5 million deaths, and his savage cruelty inspired the Nazis. The hope is that by fully exposing such crimes, they might never be permitted to happen again.




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