MIM Notes 229 March 1, 2001
From MIM's review of ITAL The Black Book of Communism END
The Black Book came out in France in 1997 and has provoked a storm
of controversy since then. Now it has reached the shores of the
English- speaking nations in translation through the dubious
editorial choice of Harvard University Press.
MIM has already rebutted this book in the context of struggling
against Internet fascists in 1999. Our challenge to the proponents
of the book was: "our critics become emotional and can't use their
methods to both sides of anything. The thread started because it
was about famine only in allegedly socialist countries. The only
problem was that they left out famine in the capitalist countries
to give us a comparison!"(1)
Our fascist critics trumpeted this book against us all over the
Internet as if something new were said. They cited the [inflated]
100 million death toll [which is even criticized by some of the
"Black Book's" authors] in the introduction as the main message.
Yet it remains that it is an 856 page book and there are no
statistical comparisons of premature deaths between capitalist and
socialist countries anywhere in the book, just as MIM charged all
along. The reason is simple: the Communists doubled the life
expectancies of the people of the Soviet Union and China. That is
the overall picture. It does not mean there were not civil wars or
executions, including some unjust ones, but overall, the violence
of communism is less than that of capitalism, by far.
The simple scientific link missing in the minds of our critics is
the link between poverty under a system of private property and
death. Poverty under capitalism causes death from lack of food, a
decent environment and adequate health care. Twist and turn as it
might, the pre-scientific intelligentsia will never treat this
fact in a systematic and thereby scientific manner despite 800
page wailings.
It turns out that the capitalists have a Black Book of Capitalism
forthcoming. It is like Lenin said about the capitalists bidding
for the rope contract for the hanging of their class. We hope it
teaches the people how a life expectancy is calculated and why it
is superior to tallying millions of deaths in selective patches
the way our critics do. The death toll for capitalism reaches 100
million from starvation alone, every 8 to 12 years as MIM has
already discussed in its essays on this available on our FAQ web
page. It is a measure of general ignorance of the public that
purchases monopoly capitalist periodicals and the conscious evil
of some intellectuals that the Black Book could create any stir at
all with its 100 million figure while so many more die each decade
under capitalism.
Overall, somehow or another, the Black Book of Communism has
managed to raise the debate one notch. It is a measure of the
success of the class struggle that the reactionary intelligentsia
felt compelled to write an 854 page book touching on the death
toll of communism. By seeking to put a number on the premature
deaths caused by communist movements in the 20th century, the pre-
scientific intelligentsia who wrote the book brought the subject
right to the edge of science before recoiling in horror and
retreating to atemporal moral dogmas more fit for inner spiritual
reflection than discussion in public. ...
The authors are largely ex-communists who had thought communism is
some kind of purified Christianity. They never understood the
science involved in supporting communism. The anti-communists can
take advantage of religious mysticism, selective humyn-rights
absolutism and the relativism of post- modernism that is so trendy
today, but they themselves can never put forward a coherent and
historically detailed line themselves, for the same reasons that
one religion can never conquer the whole world.
ITAL The complete review, which goes into questions such as the
Hitler-Stalin pact, the Ukrainian famine, and the "Black Book's"
mathematical mistakes in detail, is available at
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/commie.html. END