Book Review: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism

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Kengor, Paul. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism: The Killingest Idea Ever (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2017) print edition

I’ve been a reader of the P.I.G. guides since the inaugural volume, Robert Spencer’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades. Some books are better than others, but this one is among the best. Yes, it is opinionated. Yes, it is brutal about some things, quoting first-hand accounts of the horrors of Communism in the USSR, Cambodia, and elsewhere. But the sources are excellent, the presentation is good, and you get a lot of information in a relatively compact package.

Dr. Kengor begins with some examples of the current state of awareness about Communism. It seems to be, to put it mildly, lousy. Then he considers just why Communism has such a bad rap, or should. Any ideology that can claim the deaths of at least 120,000,000 people between 1917 and 2017 should be infamous, not trendy. And so Dr. Kengor goes back to Marx and the early Marxists and other Communists, then the USSR, its various apparatuses for propaganda and encouraging global revolution, infamous Communists, and the influence Communism had on US universities, education, and culture.

As with all P.I.G. books, there are lots of “for further reading” suggestions, quotations from the people mentioned in the text, copious notes and sources, and nary a pretext at “balance.” Stalin and Mao, Marx and Che Guevara are not lionized in this book. There’s precious little about how Communism “liberated women and minorities” (because it didn’t, at least not in the sources the author quotes.) Instead you get a very basic but thorough discussion about just how evil Communism was, and is. There’s a reason people from Guatemala, Chile, and Mexico are not flocking to go to Venezuela to partake of the wonders of “socialism.”

Some of the material in the book was a review, some was new, and the sources are extremely useful for 1) rebutting country-club socialists and 2) having material to use at my day job. Kengor argues that the communists have never “gotten it right” and will never “get it right this time.” It’s depressing, but also bracing to have the material in hand, easy to refer to. The Black Book of Communism and other works on the ills of the ideology have far more detail, but at 1200 pages, most people probably do not want to carry around TBBoC. And the Black Book is out of date in terms of how many people died under Mao and Stalin, and other Communist dictators. It now appears Stalin might tie Mao, which raises just their totals alone to 120,000,000, plus Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Venezuela, the Shining Path and other terrorists’ victims, the people caught in things like the Angolan War…

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism is not a fun read, and not an easy one. The author doesn’t write down to readers or try to make Marx and Lenin any easier to understand. But the book is very useful. I had planned on sending this copy to Sib when I finished with it, but I may keep it, or get a second copy to pass along. This is too useful as a quick reference.

I highly recommend this book.

FTC Notice: I purchased this book for my own use and received no remuneration or benefit for the review.