I've just received notice of a book about to be published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Edited by Paul Hollander, and titled From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States, advance materials say
It gathers together more than forty dramatic personal memoirs of Communist violence and repression from political prisoners across the globe. From these compelling accounts several distinctive features of Communist political violence can be discerned. The most important, argues Hollander, is that communism was "violence with a higher purpose"—that is, it was devised and undertaken to create a historically superior social system that would not only abolish scarcity, exploitation, and inequality, but would also create a new and unique sense of community, social solidarity, and personal fulfillment.
Nothing, of course, was allowed to stand in the way of this effort to radically and totally transform the human condition—least of all human beings.
I have no doubt this is a tremendous book, and one I would like to read.