Jonathan Wilde at Catallarchy has orchestrated a moving and edifying May Day blog extravangaza on the dark history of communism. Catallarchy has gone the extra mile here, offering twelve fine short essays, and leading off with R.J. Rummel, Nicholas Weininger, and yours truly (on the misnomer of Stalinist “industrialization”) as guest bloggers.

My personal favorites:

  • Randall McElroy’s Torture and Tyranny: The Real Che:

    Che might have been handsome and brave. But he was also a murderer and a tyrant.

  • Rainbough Phillips’ The Teacher Holocaust:

    On August 25, 1966, the students of the Second Middle School attached to Beijing Teachers University beat three people to death on their campus…

  • And if you’re not convinced in the existence of left-wing media bias, don’t miss Jonathan Wilde’s Walter Duranty: Stalin’s Western Apologist:

    [Duranty] was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the NY Times was one of the most respected media outlets in the world. But the Gray Lady likely was not the only institution buttering his bread as Ukrainians starved. Durant’s Moscow four-room apartment was stocked with vodka and caviar, and he employed the services of a maid, personal chauffeur, and a cook who would become his mistress. In a time when the rest of the world needed to know of the horrors of Stalin’s campaign to wipe out the kulaks, Duranty used his credibility and clout to cover-up the events of the Ukrainian famine.

    Post-script: I set up my online Museum of Communism in 1997. It currently googles second in the world if you search for “communism.” When communism was going strong, most of the world knew only of its mildest crimes: the Berlin Wall, the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Now that communism lies in the dust-bin of history, the web and the blogosphere are re-telling its shocking record of mass murder, slave labor, and famine. If google is any measure, this time the world is listening.