On April 21st, I put up a post on Paul Hollander's book From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. Now, today, Jamie Glasov offers an insightful interview with the editor, Paul Hollander, that is well worth reading. Hollander says,
My motivation for putting this book together is quite straightforward and longstanding. I have been impressed (and dismayed) for many years, indeed decades, by the phenomenal and profound Western (esp. American) ignorance of communist systems in general and the deprivations they imposed on their people in particular.
I found especially noteworthy and puzzling the contrast between this ignorance (and the very limited interest) and the lively (and fully justified) preoccupation with the Holocaust. In the introduction to the book, I discussed at some length the differences and similarities between the Holocaust and the communist mass murders and tried to explain the different moral responses in the West. . . .
The Anthology may be considered a "landmark" because there is nothing like it; nobody has before brought together such writings in one volume; moreover these writings represent experiences from every single communist system, extinct or surviving, from Albania to Vietnan. Many of the selections are also of considerable literary merit.
Read the whole interview.