(This takes about seven minutes to read.)

Of all the relics that sit within the anticommunists’ treasury, The Black Book of Communism sits atop their highest pedestal. Without this work, they would have no semblance of academic support behind the seemingly infinite number of body counts that they misattribute to us. They would also have fewer jokes to recycle:

Because of this, there is nothing that you can show them that would convince them to discard this poorly researched book. Not several of the authors distancing theirselves from it. Not the book’s methodological errors. Not the book’s passive–aggressive fascist apologia. And not the fact that when Maurice Papon was put on trial in the 1990s for deporting 1,600 Jews to death camps, his lawyers wanted to admit The Black Book of Communism as evidence for his relative ‘innocence’:

The political culture born of this era was still in place decades later when a group of French historians, led by Courtois, put together Le Livre noir du communisme, a book of essays on the ‘crimes’ of Communist régimes. […] Publication of Le Livre noir coincided with the trial of Maurice Papon, a former Vichy official charged with crimes against humanity for his complicity in the deportation of Jews.³ Papon’s lawyer asked for a copy of Le Livre noir to be placed in the trial dossier.

All nothing but unfortunate coincidences, presumably!

As we shall soon see, however, the challenge presented by The Black Book of Communism is nothing new. Already in early 1872, the photographist Ernest-Charles Appert published a series of photomontages misattributing crimes to the Paris Communists, a publication which nearly coincided with the bourgeoisie’s construction of “Sacré-Cœur Basilica as a ‘penance’ not for the thousands of men, women and children slain by Versailles, but for the ‘crimes’ of the Commune.” Yet these attempts at documentation and memorialisation would prove quite humbling compared to what was to come later.

In the 1920s, a certain petty bourgeois anticommunist bombastically predicted that communism’s triumph would extinguish not only one hundred million innocents but all human life on Earth:

The Jewish doctrine of Marxism repudiates the aristocratic principle of Nature and substitutes for it the eternal privilege of force and energy, numerical mass and its dead weight. Thus it denies the individual worth of the human personality, impugns the teaching that nationhood and race have a primary significance, and by doing this it takes away the very foundations of human existence and human civilization.

If the Marxist teaching were to be accepted as the foundation of the life of the universe, it would lead to the disappearance of all order that is conceivable to the human mind. And thus the adoption of such a law would provoke chaos in the structure of the greatest organism that we know, with the result that the inhabitants of this earthly planet would finally disappear.

Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through the ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago.

The Russian Revolution, in his eyes, was slowly confirming his prediction. Quoting Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945, page 230:

Vinberg’s colleagues Scheubner‐Richter and Rosenberg in particular stressed that the “Jewish Bolshevik” dictatorship had killed millions of Russians through war, disease, starvation, and execution. In an October 1922 edition of Aufbau Correspondence, Scheubner‐Richter estimated the costs of the “Bolshevik experiment” to the Russian people at approximately two million refugees and 35 million dead.⁶¹

In an August 1921 Völkisch Observer article, “The Pogrom Against the German and the Russian Peoples,” Rosenberg claimed of Russia: “A characteristic Jewish rule of terror was set up as world history had not yet seen […] Over 30 million people have sunk away through murder, starvation, and cholera.”⁶² He revised his figures upwards in his 1923 Protocols work. He asserted, “Over 40 million Russians perished through the Jewish terror.”⁶³ Hitler used the figure of 40 million Russian victims of starvation that the Jews had caused as early as an August 1921 speech.⁶⁴

He was unalone in his pessimism. On September 13, 1935, Joseph Goebbels claimed that,

Millions of workers on hunger-wages such as are not thought of in western Europe, millions of afflicted and sorrowing peasants who have been robbed of their land, which is being completely ruined by the stupid experiment of a paralysing collectivism, famine which claims millions of victims year after year in a country of such vast extent that it might serve as a granary for the whole of Europe, […]

Similarly on July 6, 1941, he boldly asserted that,

Those who could remember pre-Bolshevist times, even if by hearsay, were slaughtered.

From an anticommunist’s 1942 exhibit:

According to the GPU’s figures, nearly two million people were executed during the years 1917 to 1921. A direct result of the revolution was the terrible famine that demanded 19 million victims between 1917 and 1934. Over 21 million people lost their lives though this Jew-incited revolution and its consequences.

You have undoubtedly noticed that when anticommunists compare body counts between Adolf Schicklgruber, Joseph Stalin, Máo Zédōng & alii, they almost always assign the lowest number to Adolf Schicklgruber. This is, likewise, nothing new. Quoting Morris Kominsky’s The Hoaxers, page 117:

In the April 1965 American Opinion the Texas dragon slayer returns to the arena with more lies from the [Fascist] propaganda arsenal. Emboldened by the accolades from the Birchers for his previous performance, Dies now tells us that the Communists killed 25 million people in Russia and 35 million in China. Then he refers to the Hitler atrocities as “the crimes of a Nazi régime deposed twenty years ago.” This sleight-of-hand performance is, of course, designed to sell a “let bygones be bygones” attitude with respect to the [Fascists] and to whip up hysteria against Communists, but more especially against liberals.

This line, of covertly or overtly defending [Fascism] and absolving it of its crimes against humanity, has become part and parcel of the ideology of the Ultra-Right.

As he astutely wrote on page 259:

The atrocity tale is a typical Ultra-Rightist propaganda device. In its simplest terms, it consists of charging the Communists with atrocities of such astronomical proportions that the [Fascist] bestialities and mass extermination pale to insignificance. It is an oblique way of whitewashing Hitler and his associates.

Now, what is missing from these body counts? That is right: they are too low! In the 1980s—if not earlier—anticommunists had to spell out in no uncertain terms that we annihilated over one hundred millions innocents. For example, Chilean anticommunist propaganda from 1984 claimed that,

Setenta y siete años después, las estadísticas de expertos europeos señalan que el comunismo ha asesinado aproximadamente a 143 millones de personas.

Also in 1984, Nicholas Nazarenko, the self-styled leader of the World Federation of Cossack National Liberation Movement of Cossackia and the Cossack American Republican National Federation, said this in a speech that he gave to the Captive Nations Committee:

“There is a certain ethnic group that today makes its home in Israel,” Nazarenko told the gathering. “This ethnic group works with the Communists all the time. They were the Fifth Column in Germany and in all the Captive Nations. […] They would spy, sabotage and do any act in the interest of Moscow,” he claimed. “Of course there had to be the creation of a natural self defense against this Fifth Column,” he said, referring to the [Axis] concentration camps. “They had to be isolated. Security was needing [sic]. [So] the Fifth Column was arrested and imprisoned.

“This particular ethnic group was responsible for aiding [the] Soviet NKVD,” he continued. “A million of our people [were] destroyed as a result of them aiding the NKVD. You hear a lot about the Jewish Holocaust,” he exclaimed, his yellowed mustache quivering, “but what about the 140 million Christians, Moslems and Buddhists killed by Communism? That is the real Holocaust, and you never hear about it!”²⁵ The Captive Nations Committee’s crowd responded with excited applause in the most enthusiastic welcome for any speaker of that evening.

The so-called Captive Nations, as long-term readers here should know, formed the basis for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and was polluted with Axis sympathizers from the beginning. No wonder, then, that the death toll attributed to us counts both Axis personnel and their collaborators, whom anticommunists honor even as they equate us with the German Fascists.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation received President Bill Clinton’s blessing 1993, and fellow war criminal President Donald Trump declared ‘Anti-Communism Week’ in 2025. Now, pause for a moment and ask yourselves: why would Washington and other anticommunist régimes—which willingly massacred millions of indigenous humans as well as poor people in the previous centuries, slaughter hundreds of people through police violence, and let tens of millions of people die yearly from preventable causes—be so concerned with a movement that allegedly massacred one hundred million innocents? Is it because these anticommunist régimes simply care about our safety and well being? No! It is because these régimes exist for the upper classes and they have to justify their existence to the rest of us. Our anticommunist rulers may be incompetent propagandists sometimes, but overall they know what they are doing.

Of course, it would be absurd to assert that our movement has never once applied lethal force. Did I not remind you earlier, dearest readers, that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regularly spent their afternoons tossing boulders at White cishet capitalist men who were all lined up together like bowling pins? Anybody who understands that most capitalists would rather perish than give up their excessive and wastefully hoarded wealth also understands that these that actions are the inevitable consequences of capitalism’s inability to distribute resources logically.

Anticommunists can claim, oblivious to (or in denial of) the reality behind them, that any movement or system that kills even a single person is a complete failure. Contrary to what they claim, though, anticommunists have very little interest in preserving innocent lives. Try showing them a calculation estimating the number of people that their counterrevolutionary movement massacred, and watch how little they’ll care. You’ll be lucky if you get even a half-assed apology like ‘maybe some mistakes were made’, ‘nobody’s perfect’ or ‘sorry if you were offended’.

It is their insistence that you accept their propaganda at face value, while they have to privilege to dismiss careful research out of hand, that demonstrates to any reasonable observer what anticommunists’ intentions truly are.