At the Harvard Crimson: "100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice."

Nothing new to us here, but the fact that this is currently the second-most read article at the Harvard Crimson might be news.

Laura A. Nicolae, an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Harvard, writes:

In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.

My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.

...

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. ...

Worth reading the whole thing just for her perspective. It's short and to the point.

Also, I didn't realize the English translation of The Black Book of Communism was published by the Harvard University Press.