How do you write the history of a political movement which killed between 100,000,000 and 150,000,000 men, women, and children? You gather some of the best historians in Europe under the direction of the Director of Research for the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris and have them examine the archives in the former Soviet Bloc to reveal the crimes committed by generations of those who felt they could change human nature. Instead, they tortured, murdered, deported, starved, and exploited the hundreds of millions under their control.
Taking each country which has suffered under Communism, the authors created a major best seller by documenting the crimes of the heroes of the left, such as “Uncle” Ho, Che, “the Great Helmsman” as well as lesser known butchers in Ethiopia, Angola, Afghanistan, Romania, Cambodia, etc. The tragedies people suffered are even worse when one realizes that often there was no end plan for the killing as in Cambodia, or that a nation which had been struggling to become Westernized was brutally thrown back into the Middle Ages such as Afghanistan was by the Soviet Union. Thus, even with the fall of these terrible regimes, future generations are and were condemned to struggle simply to reach the social level they had before Communism.
Leaders such a Lenin, Stalin, Ceausescu, Poi Pot, and others were determined to destroy the past so that they could build the future. They believed, as Orwell wrote that, “he who controls the present, controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future”. To do this, the very culture and history of nations had to be destroyed and one cannot help but think of the actions today where statues are torn down by mobs who offer only failed policies and visions for the future, because “this time it will be different”. Everyone is ignorant, but to wallow in stupidity and to attempt to impose it on others as we see today is the greatest waste of human life.
At over eight hundred pages, this can be a daunting read, but to have in one place the overwhelming proof of a failed philosophy, to read page after page of stupidity will make one more than ever determined that such a barbaric system must be stopped.
