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Lädt ... From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (2006)von Paul Hollander (Herausgeber)
   Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. 1   xieouyang | May 8, 2010 |  keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
As a global phenomenon, the scale and character of communism is only now coming into focus. The opening of formerly inaccessible archives and landmark books such as "The Black Book of Communism" have helped to establish empirically the extent and brutality of Communist totalitarianism. But what about Communist terror as it was personally experienced by the dissidents, the so-called obstructionists who stood in the way of the Communists' efforts to create the new man of the socialist utopia? "From the Gulag to the Killing Fields" is another landmark volume--and the only one of its kind. Edited by renowned scholar of communism Paul Hollander, it gathers together more than forty dramatic personal memoirs of Communist violence and repression from political prisoners across the globe. From these compelling accounts several distinctive features of Communist political violence can be discerned. The most important, argues Hollander, is that communism was "violence with a higher purpose"--that is, it was devised and undertaken to create a historically superior social system that would not only abolish scarcity, exploitation, and inequality, but would also create a new and unique sense of community, social solidarity, and personal fulfillment. Nothing, of course, was allowed to stand in the way of this effort to radically and totally transform the human condition--least of all human beings. But, as Anne Applebaum notes in her foreword, human nature persisted: "Every person who entered the camps discovered qualities in themselves, both good and evil, that they hadn't previously known they had. Ultimately, that selfdiscovery is the true subject of most camp memoirs, and the true subject of thisbook." Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)323.044Social sciences Political Science Civil and political rights Civil Rights Essays; Special TopicsKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (4)
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The introduction has two general themes. The first one, that has been discussed by other authors such as [Alain Besancon] in [A Century of Horrors] is the curious asymmetrical treatment by many people of Nazism and Communism, even though both systems are intrinsically evil and resulted in millions of murders of innocent people; more so the communists than the Nazis. While Nazism is universally abhorred and its deeds condemned globally, Communism is respected and even admired still, particularly in academic cicles, and the tens of millions of people murdered are ignored.
Paul Hollander, the editor who wrote the introduction, does a terrific job of summarizing and footnoting the 20th century communist regimes. He highlights the great similarities of techniques across all communist countries, despite their cultural differences. The dehumanization and humiliation of people considered dangerous to the state, is a common thread through many of the regimes. With the ultimate purpose of creating a 'new man,' all these regimes proved to clever and cruel in their approach to re-educate or eliminate those who were deemed to be antagonists to the state.
I have moved my summaries or impressions of the various chapters to the Comments' section, because there are too many to include here. (