Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 17:20:23 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Communism's name


        
A list member recently wrote to ask if I had heard about the controversy
surrounding the so-called "Black Book" of Communism, published last year in
Paris.

*Le Livre Noir Du Communisme* edited by "former" Trotsky Stephane Courtois
(together with several former Communists and liberals) details lavishly the
"crimes" of Marxism, from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989.  Courtois
tallies it all up to equal approximately 85 to 100 million lives lost, a
"tragedy", he says, of "planetary dimensions".  The book has been widely
hailed by both the Right and the anti-Communist Left in France, and created
stir in Parliament last October when it was used to attack Lionel Jospin's
Socialist/Communist coalition government.

The book has run into serious -- perhaps fatal -- trouble.  Its conclusions,
of course, have been fiercely contested, and not just by the Left in French
politics.  A number of the book's own authors -- including Nicolas Wirth and
Jean-Louis Margolin -- have repudiated the editor's bolder anti-Communist
Introduction, and have raised doubts about the quality of research into the
newly opened Soviet archives, for example.  Three of the authors whose works
figure prominently in the volume's ambiguous "bibliography" have distanced
themselves from the book's sweeping conclusions, and a number of documents
quoted in reference to the Soviet collectivizations of the 1930s apparently
do not exist.  The gist of the "original" conclusions reached in the "black
book" depend, at the end of the day, on the same old works by Conquest,
Soviet and Chinese emigres, trotskies, liberals, and the like. 

Too, there have been revelations (most recently in *Le Figaro* in February)
of a number of unsavory influences around Mr Courtois, including those
emitting from the noxious Jean-Marie Le Pen.  Indeed, a copy of the original
Introduction, penned by Mr Courtois and heavily revised by the publisher,
not only acknowledged the "assistance" of several of Mr Le Pen's associates,
but seemed to argue for an exculpation of Nazism as a "lesser" evil to its
"Bolshevik counterpart".  A planned series on the book by the *New York
Times* was scrapped following these revelations.  

The "black book" is unlikely to be of any real help to institutions like the
*Times* which target that all important middle-strata (affluent managerial
and professional types who ordinarily lacked political creativity); it is
too transparently flawed.  The far Right may try to use it, but here, too,
obstacles arise.  Rupert Murdoch, with one eye on the vast Chinese market,
has already nixed the idea of an English version, and has given the book's
agency the Bum's Rush so far as syndication is concerned.  

In the end, rabid anti-Communism, like its twin brother, bubble-headed
liberal idealism, succumbs to the dictates of the good ole-fashioned Yankee
dollar.  

Louis Godena



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