From:
[email protected]
Subject: "Black Book" partial victory
On February 26th, the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) won a partial
victory when the editor and translator of the "Black Book of
Communism" admitted misplacement of decimal points in the chapter on China
by Jean-Louis Margolin. Those misplaced decimals caused deaths in the
Great Leap movement led by Mao to be overestimated by a minimum of a
factor of 10. The editor's letter is appended below.
MIM still demands that Harvard University Press (which published "The
Black Book") print an erratum to the first edition. We are also pressing
the editor and publisher on several other factual errors, including, most
relevantly, their belittlement of the brutal incarceration craze in the
United States.
"The Black Book" claims that imprisonment rates in China and the United
States are "more or less identical" -- 0.5% in China and 0.645% in the
United states. However, the difference between 0.5% and 0.645% is quite
significant -- 40 countries listed in UN statistics have lower
imprisonment rates than 145 per 100,000.
The difference in incarceration rates is important to hundreds of
thousands of people each year imprisoned in the United States who would
not be imprisoned, if only the United States had the lower imprisonment
rate of other countries.
Furthermore, the December 1998 Atlantic Monthly suggested that the United
States holds half a million more prisoners than China total. That's an
absolute statistic not even considering China's much larger population!
More and more people -- the vast majority of them non-communists -- are
becoming concerned with the United States high incarceration rate and its
human toll. It is of concern that while engaged in its own anti-communist
crusade Harvard University Press printed lied about the facts or covered
up the real extend of imprisonment in the United States.
MIM's complete reply to Harvard University Press can be found at
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/agitation/blackb4.html.
If you wish to support MIM's call for an erratum, or wish to send your own
letter to Harvard University press (which MIM would reprint), go to
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/agitation/blackb2.html or contact
[email protected].
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February 26th letter from "Black Book" editor Mark Kramer
*********************************************************
Harvard University Press sent me your e-mail correspondence about The
Black Book of Communism. The points you raise in No. 1 and No. 2 are
certainly correct. My original translation of these passages used the
European symbol for "per thousand" (as the French edition did), but
evidently the typesetter wasn't accustomed to the symbol and read it as
"percent" rather than "per thousand." I should have noticed the erroneous
switch when I looked over the galley proofs. I appreciate your drawing the
misprint to our attention. It will be fixed in the next printing of the
book.
Best regards,
Mark Kramer
Director, Harvard Project on Cold War Studies
Senior Associate, Davis Center for Russian Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
