Here's your Amen:
But hey! It's all in the name of fighting communism right?! America still has never done any wrong right?! Those bastard communists had it coming for simply being communists no?!
I suppose many of you believe ignorance is bliss though.
Actually, I thought Ignorance was your middle name.
“[The] relationship [between communism and Nazism] may never be fully understood. But the Russian Red Terror, in its emphasis on the elimination of entire classes of peoples, in its description of opponents as "vermin" to be exterminated, does seem like a precursor of the German concentration camps. Moreover, Nazism profited greatly not only from Lenin's and Stalin's Gulag system--Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, solicited reports about the operations of Soviet camps--but also from Bolshevism itself, which served as both a whipping boy and, at times, a political idea that could be collaborated with. The two ideologies validated each other.
After World War II, the prestige of the Soviet Union was at its height. The country had fought on the side of the democracies, U.S. war propaganda had painted pipesmoking "Uncle Joe Stalin" as a friendly fellow. In Europe, communists made a comeback in France, Italy and Germany with the flowering of the myth that communists were merely heroic anti-fascist freedom fighters. Thus the gruesome Soviet record was suppressed.
After the halo wore off the Soviet Union, China emerged as a new beacon for credulous Westerners. .Mr. Margolin writes that "one myth was common in the West: the idea that China was far from being a model democracy, but that at least Mao had managed to give a bowl of rice to every Chinese person." In fact, nothing was further than the truth. Mao, like Stalin deliberately engineered a famine that killed untold millions.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL MONDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1999
“The Black Book of Communism states its purpose as being "to paint a true picture of all the criminal aspects of the Communist world, from individual assassinations to mass murder." It devotes more than 200 of its 856 pages to the Soviet Union, about which it gives an indispensable history; but there is in turn a detailed chronicling of events in Spain, Poland, Central and Southeastern Europe, China, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan…”
In addition, the Black Book continues the process of refuting the premise, prominently advanced by Khrushchev, that Communism in Soviet Russia started out benignly, but turned vicious with Stalin. Lenin, we are reminded, put into place all of the apparatus of the terror-state. It helps to read Lenin's 1918 telegram in which he ordered the hanging of 100 kulaks: "I mean hang publicly, so that people see it... Do all this so that for miles around people see it, understand it, tremble."
The Black Book of Communism
The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies; Washington; Fall 2000; Dwight D Murphey;
“In its many enthroned variations, from Lenin's 1917 revolution to the recent MarxistLeninist regimes of Africa, communism has killed upwards of 100 million people65 million in China alone. Courtois and his colleagues do not simply unfold the numbers relentlessly and numbingly. Instead, they painstakingly explore the many ways the killing was done-from summary execution to forced deportations, from mass starvation to the gulag-and examine its many pretexts.”
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
Foreign Affairs (Book Review); New York; Nov/Dec 1999; Robert Legvold;
[Paul Hollander] is best known for his now-classic book Political Pilgrims, which examined the phenomenon of twentieth-century Western intellectuals who allowed themselves to be seduced and duped by radical revolutionary regimes of the most patent despotism and brutality. How and why did so many intelligent, cultivated, and educated people come to believe such obvious nonsense? Pilgrims was a tragicomic study of how the cherished ideas of the self-important can so easily overwhelm their common sense, and how education can serve to blind as well as to enlighten.
Between Experience and Reflection by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 27 April 2009
