Courtois, Werth, Panné, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin
Il libro nero del Comunismo

We Italians have experienced a totalitarian regime and were then the country with the strongest Communist party in Europe. Certainly, there is a correlation between these two phenomena, which have left a strong ideological legacy that today, however, smacks too much of rhetoric. Rhetoric often used in the dialectic of palace politics, a dialectic of falsehoods as it opposes two ideologically identical factions. And if in the past these two ideologies were completely different, in reality they have revealed themselves with the same brutality and violence.

The book in question contains about seven hundred pages full of information and data gathered by historians and researchers, who compiled various material made accessible after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most documented and significant part is dedicated to the former Soviet Union. It also includes those communist regimes that have perpetrated crimes against people, that is, all of them: from China to Cuba, from the African to the South American areas.

I have chosen, in this setting, to analyze only one aspect of the complex issue, described in the first part by Stéphane Courtois, attempting to compose a collage using quotations (in italics) drawn from the same. I would like to present this table as a maximum synthesis of the data contained in the book regarding crimes against people:

• USSR, 20 million dead

• China, 65 million dead

• Vietnam, 1 million dead

• North Korea, 2 million dead

• Cambodia, 2 million dead (about a quarter of the population in three and a half years)

• Eastern Europe, 1 million dead

• Latin America, 150,000 dead

• Africa, 1 million 700,000 dead

• Afghanistan, 1 million 50,000 dead

• international communist movement and non-ruling communist parties, about 10,000 dead

These deaths are mainly due to: “capital execution (hanging, shooting, drowning, flogging, and in some cases, chemical gases, poison or car accident; annihilation through starvation (induced and/or unsustained famines); deportation, where death can occur during transportation or at the place of residence and/or forced labor (exhaustion, disease, hunger, cold); civil wars (where it's difficult what falls within the struggle between power and rebels from the real massacre of civilians)”

Nazism and communism (or why the red is commonly more accepted than the black): “In the 1920s-40s, communism violently condemned the terror implemented by fascist regimes. It is true that Italian fascism often mistreated and imprisoned its political opponents. But it rarely came to killing...”

“Until before the war, Nazi terror targeted only a few groups; communists, anarchists, socialists, and some syndicalists, interned and tortured in concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, about 20,000 left-wing militants were assassinated, in addition to Germans who did not conform to the Aryan racial characteristics: mentally ill, handicapped, and elderly. Between 1939 and 1941, about 70,000 Germans were murdered... but only with the war did Nazi terror unleash: 15 million civilians killed in the occupied countries; 5 million 10,000 Jews; 3 million 300,000 Soviet prisoners of war; 1 million and 100,000 deportees died in concentration camps; hundreds of thousands of gypsies; 8 million people used for forced labor and 1 million 600,000 people detained in camps and not deceased.”

“The Nazi terror impressed for three reasons: first of all, because it directly affected Europeans. Secondly, because following the defeat of Nazism and the Nuremberg trials of its leaders, its crimes were designated and stigmatized as such. Finally, the revelation of the genocide of the Jews shocked consciences for its seemingly irrational character, its racist dimension, and the radicality of the crime.”

“The facts speak for themselves and show that the crimes committed by communist regimes concern about 100 million people versus the 25 million victims of Nazism. This simple observation should at least prompt a reflection on the similarity that the regime, which from 1945 onwards was considered the most criminal of the century, and a system that enjoyed full international legitimacy until 1991 and which today is in power in some countries and continues to have supporters worldwide.”

“The 1945 winners have legitimately made crime, and in particular the genocide of the Jews, the focus of their condemnation of Nazism. Numerous scholars worldwide have been working on this topic for decades, to which dozens of films and books have been dedicated. But on the subject of communist crimes, there are no such studies...”

“Faced with communist propaganda, the West has long demonstrated extraordinary blindness, caused both by naïveté towards a particularly perverse system, fear of Soviet power, and the cynicism of politicians and entrepreneurs.”

“The concealment of the criminal dimension primarily concerns the attachment to the idea of revolution... its symbols – red flag, Internationale, clenched fist – resurface every time a significant social movement appears. Che Guevara comes back into fashion.”

Without taking anything away from the atrocities of Nazism, I just wanted to highlight how communist regimes have massively contributed to making this '900 terribly bloody, as if the two world wars weren't enough. I would therefore like to invite everyone to let go of the useless ideological clashes that still exist between the right and the left today, remnants of a political history now outdated, and often used in favor of politicians in a false and deceptive palace dialectic, good for filling magazines and news broadcasts, to distract attention from other far more important aspects of political life.

This book, published in France in 1997, was released in Italy the following year by Mondadori. As everyone will have understood, it is not a light book, both for its size and its contents; I personally delved only into the parts dedicated to the former U.S.S.R., China, and Cuba, and I can affirm that it was enough for me to have a clear view of this side of history that has been obscured from us for years. If I never believed the Americans or the Church, who said that communists ate children, I certainly cannot remain indifferent to the contents of this important document, which contributed to erasing the little sympathy I had for the communist ideology. Now I cling close to my anarchic vein, which, as a political ideal not yet translated into practice, remains unscathed by historical judgments.