Snippet 1: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million - Granite Grok

Snippet 1: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

stalinI’ve been meaning to do this for awhile.  And given our current circumstances, now seems about right.  I read this fantastic non-fiction book late last year that I’d like to share bits of; hopefully, this will encourage you to read it.  It’s by Martin Amis, and it’s about the left in the West and the seduction of Communism in the 20th century.  It focuses mostly on Iosif Vissarionovi? Džugašvili (Stalin. Or, Koba to his friends), but also touches on others including his predecessor V. Lenin. It’s truly eye-opening and quite terrifying.

Even if we add the total losses of the Second World War (40– 50 million) to the losses of the Holocaust (c. 6 million), we arrive at a figure which, apparently, Bolshevism can seriously rival. Civil War, Red Terror, famine; Collectivization accounted for perhaps 11 million, Conquest suggests; Solzhenitsyn gives a figure (“ a modest estimate”) of 40– 50 million who were given long sentences in the gulag from 1917 to 1953 (and many followed after the brief Khrushchev thaw); and then there is the Great Terror, the deportations of peoples in the 1940s and 1950s (“ the specially displaced”), Afghanistan … The “twenty million” begins to look more like the forty million. Of course, the figures are still not secure, and they vary dismayingly. But these are not the “imaginary” zeros of the millennium, and we will certainly need seven of them in our inventory of the Soviet experiment.dd We badly need to know the numbers of the dead. More than this, we need to know their names.ee And the dead, too, need us to know their names.

— Amis, Martin (2014-09-17). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International) (Kindle Locations 1157-1159). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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