Hacker News Books

For context, I'm not a McCarthyite, nor a conservative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

See "The Black Book of Communism".
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repressio...

Voluntary communes and Kibbutzen have failed as well - none have been capable of operating without subsidy.

These are books you are unlikely to be able to read in China, and not because reading history does not comport with some imagined "Chinese way" but rather because the truth is threatening to totalitarians.

And not as isolated incident of abuse of power, usually on a mass scale. They liked their genocides like they liked their mines and factories -- huge.

Not to mention the economic system of constant shortages where you had to bribe everyone, including the meat store clerk.

..simply do not produce enough to sustain themselves. Capitalist farmers do, with a surplus they sell. All such voluntary collectives have collapsed (unless they get subsidies from the government).

> have nothing to do with mass slaughter

I strongly suggest reading "The Black Book of Communism". Every advocate of communism needs to read it, if only to prepare an answer.

You're right that nothing in the principles of communism suggest mass slaughter. But those who try to implement it time and again resort to it. The reason is fairly straightforward - people resist having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives. The response is to kill them.

Again and again.

"According to the official Bolshevik position, which is still maintained by some modern Marxists, the rich peasants (kulaks) withheld their surplus grain to preserve their lives;[2] statistics indicate that most of the grain and the other food supplies passed through the black market.[3][4][5] The Bolsheviks believed peasants were actively trying to undermine the war effort. The Black Book of Communism asserts that Lenin ordered the seizure of the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence and their seed grain in retaliation for this "sabotage", leading to widespread peasant revolts.[6] In 1920, Lenin ordered increased emphasis on food requisitioning from the peasantry."

Still not seeing any fringe sources.

> Arguably, this could just as easily be applied to mainstream liberal views on the danger (or lack thereof) of nuclear power, GMOs, etc.

Yeah, it's obnoxious and dangerous there, too.

Not sure where the parent got this supposedly superior "information" from -- right wing circles/books, for which every non-right regime change is an anathema?

As far as mass movements and revolutions go, this was one of the least bloody ever.

Of course for an cushy westerner in 2016 it's difficult to fathom a movement killing even 10 or 100 persons (of course those are way less than what the police kills in a year in some countries), but for people that live in places with actual turbulent history and bad governments that were toppled (were left or right wing) those things are par for the course. There are a lot of collaborators with the previous order, people the masses hate, ex-police -- including some generally innocent people caught in the comment.

That's true whether it's Romanians rising against Ceausescu or Cubans rising against the Batista regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Political...

>"According to Amnesty International, death sentences from 1959–87 numbered 237 of which all but 21 were actually carried out. (...) One estimate from The Black Book of Communism is that throughout Cuba 15,000–17,000 people were executed."

So here you have both a low estimate, and the extravagant numbers from the well known anti-communist cold-war style book.

>"The vast majority of those executed following the 1959 revolution were policemen, politicians and informers of the Batista regime accused of crimes such as torture and murder, and their public trials and executions had widespread popular support among the Cuban population. Scholars generally agree that those executed were probably guilty as accused, but that the trials did not follow due process."

All your quote says is that some people claim one side was to blame and some people claim another side was to blame.

More interesting is that you don't consider to be a "fringe source" the far-right bible The Black Book of Communism - a publication discredited and disowned even by its main authors - which in order to fabricate a high enough death count to paint the Nazis as not so bad after all and the Holocaust as nothing special, classifies as victims the likes of Nazi/SS military personnel and anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalist militias who murdered thousands of Jews in countless pogroms.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp...

"Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. [...] As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century."

The books "Death By Government" and the "Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression" estimate killings from communism at 148 million and 110 million respectively.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...)

Black's Book's estimate of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, famine, war, deportations and forced labor [1]. The breakdown of the number of deaths is given as follows:

65 million in the People's Republic of China

20 million in the Soviet Union

2 million in Cambodia

2 million in North Korea

1.7 million in Ethiopia

1.5 million in Afghanistan

1 million in the Eastern Bloc

1 million in Vietnam

150,000 in Latin America

The tally for China and North Korea needs an update because the Black Book was published in 1997. This list is incomplete in other ways. For example Mongolia's carnage in 1917 is missing as Mongolia's current government contains communist remnants and suppresses any attempts at dissemination. One of the accomplishments of Russian (Bolshevik) backed Mongolian communists was lining up and shooting 30,000 monks at point blank and dumping them in mass graves. Directly spoke to journalist who was imprisoned by communist and later government for his work and saw photographs he had taken of exhumed mass graves. Horrendous.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism):

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louise Panne, Adrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartooek, and Jean-Louis Margolin.
Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer
Harvard University Press / 858 pages / $37.50

The American Spectator Online Bookshelf
15 February 2000
Reviewed by Josh London

The End of Communism by Josh London"One death," Joseph Stalin was said to have remarked, "is a tragedy, one million is a statistic." What about, one must wonder, 80 or 100 million deaths? In reading the "Black Book of Communism," a groundbreaking effort by a group of French scholars to document the human costs of communism in the 20th century, one is immediately confronted with such discomfited figures. Stephane Courtois, in his introduction, crunches the numbers:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths; China: 65 million deaths; Vietnam: 1 million deaths; North Korea: 2 million deaths; Cambodia: 2 million deaths: Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths; Latin America: 150,000 deaths; Africa: 1.7 million deaths; Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths; The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths… The total approaches 100 million people killed.