Red Holocaust

by Steven Rosefielde

Twentieth and twenty-first century communism is a failed experiment in social engineering that needlessly killed approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more. These high crimes against humanity constitute a Red Holocaust that exceeds the combined carnage of the French Reign of Terror, Ha Shoah, Showa Japan's Asian holocaust, and all combat deaths in World War I and II. This fascinating book investigates high crimes against humanity in the Soviet Union, eastern and central Europe, North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia 1929-2009, and compares the results with Ha Shoah and the Japanese Asian Holocaust.

As in other studies, blame is ascribed to political, ideological and personal causes, but special emphasis is given to internal contradictions in Marx's utopian model as well as Stalinist and post-Stalinist transition systems concocted to realize communist ends. This faulty economic engineering forms a bridge to the larger issue of communism's historical failure.

The book

- a comprehensive study of the transcommunist holocaust

- a judicial assessment of holocaust culpability and special pleadings

- an obituary for Stalinism everywhere except North Korea, and a death watch for contemporary communism in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and Nepal

- a comparative assessment of totalitarian high crimes against humanity

- a call for memory as a defense against recurrent economic, racial and ethnic holocausts

The book will be useful to undergraduate and higher level students interested in Russian history, Stalism, communism, North and South Korean economic performance and international affairs.

Steven Rosefielde is a Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

Genres: History, Historical

360 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 9, 2009

Reviews

[6655321 · Rating 1 out of 5]

To call this a book is an insult to the concept of literacy. Steven Rosefielde engages in consistent numerical slight of hand to take what is an important and neglected part of Communist history, that is, to what extent are the structures of Statist Communism responsible for the massacres, famines and gulags [for, you know, a book that does this with any sense of decency James C. Scott wrote "Seeing Like A State"]. However, because detailing every single underhanded, ideologically faulty, or bizarre claim advanced by Rosenfield would take days, what is most galling about his work is his utter lack of respect for the victims of the "Red" Holocaust. For, like, people that do genocide studies it is usually considered important to approach your subject with compassion, Rosefield ignores that basic scrap of human dignity to make jokes about those that perished under Authoritarian Communism. Finally, what makes this book almost literal anti-thought is the sheer ideological bias of the author, as he essentially is setting up a bloated death count for Communism to excuse any excesses of capitalism because as Hayek (obviously a scholar whose work hasn't contributed to widespread death and starvation) says that free markets are the only freedom we can hope for. Possibly the best parts of this exercise in narcissistic cheerleading are where Rosefielde shows his supreme discomfort with crimes associated with capitalism (for example, although his definition of genocide he uses to put Stalin [who has been dead for over a half century]on trial* would include condemning formative events like the Atlantic Slave trade, Rosefielde simply claims that he is not comfortable with considering that genocide and we should ignore that and move on.

Recycling this book for the fraction of a cent that you would receive for pulping it is an infinitely more rewarding than reading it could ever be.

*in really one of the most surreal parts of this exercise Rosenfielde wants to put Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min, Kim Il Sung, etc. on trial in the ICC which the USA refuses to recognize because of its complicity in war crimes! Take that Rosefielde's claims that capitalist democracies have never been accused of crimes against humanity!

[Autumn Kotsiuba · Rating 2 out of 5]

His tone drove me INSANE