What I'm Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution, Warren H. Carroll, Christendom Press 1989, 1995.

A few jems from this masterpiece, the only one of dozens of books that I've read on the subject that gives proper treatment on the evils of communism:

On page 155 Carroll cites Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime p331 who quotes Zlata Zinoviev, wife of the president of the Comitern in 1921 Russia:

"Is not parental love to a large extent harmful to the child?... The family is individualistic and egotistic and the child raised by it is, for the most part, anti-social, filled with egotistic strivings...Raising is not the private task of parents, but the task of society.

and he cites Pipes' own words

Basest and most criminal of all is the moral slavery introduced by the Communists: they have laid their hands on the inner world of the working people, compelling them think only as they do.

These quotes give a hint as to the type of thinking prevalent now (expressed with more subtlety) in the Communistwealth of Massachusetts in 2007.

Carroll documents many things well: the routine use of terror and murder by all communists, the fellow travellers and sympathizers who apologized for them in the the western media, academia and certain governments, the genocides committed by Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot, the incompetance of western leaders and the grinding consistent evil perpetuated by communist adherents.

As an example, Carroll recounts the stories of families deported from the Ukraine in the 1920s who were loaded onto freight cars for weeks on long treks out to the vast wilderness of Siberia. In most cases, babies died on the way and would have to be thrown from the moving train. I attempted to convey the sense of horror and injustice of the collectivization of the "kulaks" to a friend and he too acknowledged this historical event with the wistful observation, "Well, they (the communists) had to get people to work in the right place." Indeed.

This book for me is almost like a deprogramming session. I had been involved in years of study of the Soviet Union starting in high school in 1986. The course work was lead by a teacher who, at best, could be described as naive, and at worst as an apologist for Communist atrocities. I sopped up the apologetics hook line and sinker. In 1986, the experts knew something was happening in the Soviet Union, and academics, journalists and fellow commies were watching the events with a bit of worry that I never understood, until now. Their lack of elation said it all.