The Black Book of Communism has been hugely influential and sold millions of copies since its publication in 1997. Yet some of the dramatic claims made by its editor, Stéphane Courtois, were even rejected by his own contributors when the book came out.
  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    17 hours ago

    Sure, it’s a shoddy work of history, but it’s an exemplary work of anti-communist propaganda.

    I recently heard Chris Hedges refer to it regarding the “horrors” of Communist “totalitarianism.” I think he believes every word of that book, as well as Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Funny thing about Arendt: she came from a bourgeois family and so was unsurprisingly anti-communist, and she was funded & promoted by the CIA.

    Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism:

    One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.