The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. “Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. (78 photos, 6 maps)Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. demonstrated from the outset,” but above all in their habit of reducing their victim-as had Hitler in his attacks on Jews as ’subhuman-to an abstraction: “the bourgeoisie,” “capitalists,” and “enemies of the people.” The essays are of varying quality, some quite sketchy in their scope, but overall a devastating and important book, already hailed in Europe, and the more harrowing for its sobriety.
The overwhelming question confronted by the authors is: why? The answer, writes Courtois, lies in the “Bolsheviks propensity for extreme violence. Nor is it just statistics: the authors tell, for example, of the young children in Cambodia hung from the roof by their feet and kicked from side to side until they died. And to these the authors add the cost in eastern Europe, Vietnam, North Korea, Afghanistan, Latin America, Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique. In Cambodia, the worst recent example, one in seven of the population died. In China there were probably 10 million “direct victims,” another 20 million in China’s gulag, the Laogai, and between 20 and 43 million during the Great Leap Forward, the largest man-made famine in history. In the Soviet Union the toll included 6 million deaths during the collectivization famine of 1932-33, 720,000 executions during the Great Purge, 7 million entering the gulag in 1934-41, many of them to die, and nearly 3 million still there when Stalin died. For the cumulative toll of victims of communist rule, estimated by the authors at between 85 and 100 million, dwarfs even the crimes of the Nazis. Not the least remarkable thing about this book is that this is the first time such a study has been made.
A unique attempt by French historians-as important in its way as the works of Solzhenitsyn-to chronicle the crimes of communism wherever it has attained power in the world.
0 kommentar(er)
