I hope you're hiding under your bed:
" It was not, apparently, the recitation of killings that irked the left in France but Courtois' condemnation of Leninist regimes as criminal enterprises. That stance challenged the left's deeply seated tenets that communism, despite excesses, was progressive.."
"...the cumulative toll of victims of communist rule, estimated by the authors at between 85 and 100 million, dwarfs even the crimes of the Nazis. In the Soviet Union the toll included 6 million deaths during the collectivization famine of 193233, 720,000 executions during the Great Purge, 7 million entering the gulag in 193441, many of them to die, and nearly 3 million still there when Stalin died. In China there were probably 10 million direct victims, another 20 million in China's gulag, the Laogai, and between 20 and 43 million during the Great Leap Forward, the largest man-made famine in history. In Cambodia, the worst recent example, one in seven of the population died. And to these the authors add the cost in eastern Europe, Vietnam, North Korea, Afghanistan, Latin America, Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique. Nor is it just statistics: the authors tell, for example, of the young children in Cambodia hung from the roof by their feet and kicked from side to side until they died."
amazon.com |
