If you listen to NPR or read America’s liberal newspapers of record, you have been hearing a lot in the past few years about the crimes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, about "reparations" claims for victims of American slavery and forced labor under the Nazis, or, since the recent publication of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, of the complicity of the Catholic Church — and of Christians more generally — in the Holocaust, racism, anti-Semitism and all the rest.

But have you heard of The Black Book of Communism? If not, you’re in good company. Probably the most important historical study published since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed access to Kremlin archives for the first time, the Black Book sparked passionate national debate when it was first published in France in 1997 — and yet was completely and totally ignored when it came out in translation here two years ago. Somehow stunning revelations about the crimes of Communism seemed less interesting to America’s literati than red herrings about Catholic anti-Semitism, or (to take an example from this month’s headlines) the sale of IBM technology to Hitler’s Germany. Communism? That old bogeyman? Who cares?

If you care about humanity, you should. In the pantheon of evil in the violent 20th century, Nazism has monopolized the attention of journalists, lawyers and filmmakers for decades, completely crowding out another murderous ideology that — shock though it may be to say it — claimed four times as many victims. Most historians agree that Hitler’s genocide against Jews, gypsies, Slavs and others claimed about 25 million victims. And yet, after adding together the number of aristocrats, rich bourgeois merchants, educated professionals, "kulaks," political dissidents, pious Old Believers and vaguely defined "enemies of the people" murdered by Communists in Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia, eastern Europe, Africa, Vietnam, Afghanistan and elsewhere since 1917, Stéphane Courtois in his introduction to the Black Book concludes that "the total approaches 100 million people killed." ONE HUNDRED MILLION! And that’s just the number killed, which takes no account of the millions more whose lives were disrupted and ruined.

Or consider these numbers. Hitler’s GESTAPO, the most notorious, sinister secret police force in the modern political vocabulary, employed about 7,500 people in 1939 at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact that paved the way for the joint destruction of eastern Europe by the Communists and the Nazis. Stalin’s NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, by then already had 366,000 agents hunting down "enemies of the people" in the Soviet empire, a category he would soon expand to include whole ethnic categories (such as Chechens and Tartars) and, in the early 1950s — despite having opportunistically claimed "anti-fascism" as a Communist invention — even Jews.

Or how about this? The Romanov regime, which the Bolsheviks overthrew, was notorious throughout the 18th and 19th centuries for some of the worst repression of its subjects in the western world, for tolerating and even encouraging popular anti-Jewish pogroms, among other outrages. To Americans back then, the mere mention of "Russia" conjured up images of vast tyranny, of a poor country of powerless serfs ruled only by force, with the Orthodox Church looking on approvingly as its own adherents were often brutalized.

Much of this repression was certainly real, and worthy of moral condemnation, but let’s put it into twentieth century context. Between 1825 and 1917, the Czars carried out 6,321 political executions, or roughly one-third the number Lenin’s Communist executioners carried out in the first two months after assuming power. Add up all of Pinochet’s victims in Chile over the two decades of his rule — which have probably generated more western media outrage than all Communist crimes put together — and you might be able to fill a week’s quota of political murders in Russia’s Red Terror.

Then there was Mao’s Communist regime in China, which alone was responsible for some 65 million deaths. And Pol Pot’s Communist tyranny in Cambodia, which brutally slaughtered no less than a quarter of that country’s population in roughly three years.

Why does no one speak out anymore about such atrocious crimes against humanity? Why has the Black Book, which painstakingly chronicles them, been so totally shunned by the American media? The New York Times, to its credit, did run a respectful notice in its Book Review section, but the New York Review of Books and most other prestigious opinion journals haven’t even done that. (The New York Review, in fact, commissioned a review from Robert Conquest, and then never bothered to run it). There has been no mention of the book on NPR or on the network news. Terri Gross has not interviewed the courageous authors, many of them former Communists who have only painfully come to the conclusions they reach in the book. They have not been invited to plug their book on television by Larry King or Oprah. For all intents and purposes, The Black Book of Communism has already died a quiet death in the U.S. market.

The meager reception accorded The Black Book of Communism in this country, at a time when stories about Nazi crimes against humanity continue to dominate the headlines, reflects more than mere neglect: it points to a shameful double standard for atrocity.

Moreover, it bespeaks a stunning historical ignorance, a contempt for unwelcome truths that many western intellectuals have failed to own up to for decades. As Martin Malia writes in the introduction to the American edition of The Black Book, "Communism has been the great story of the twentieth century." For 70 years it held the world in thrall, polarizing opinion between those who wanted to believe in its egalitarian promise and those who recognized it as "history’s most total tyranny." Well, as it turns out, one side was right — but those who argued for so long on the wrong side simply won’t admit this. All the Communist "fellow travelers," the liberal sympathizers, the journalists who looked the other way, the "anti-anti Communists" who demonized Reagan, for example, because he dared tell the truth about the "evil empire" — they all still just don’t get it.

Will the spokesmen of the Left ever admit the truth about Communism? One shudders to think of the answer. Marxist regimes — just like Hitler and all other revolutionaries — always drew their strongest support from impressionable young intellectuals and especially among college students, who want so desperately to believe that ideas can change the existing world into something better. Communism was even more potent than most revolutionary movements with intellectuals, for it claimed the mantle of all progressive thought to date, proclaiming universal applicability in all countries of its goal of forced economic equality (The theory of racial supremacy behind Nazism, by contrast, was by definition limited in its appeal — you either were an "Aryan" or you weren’t — and it thus developed no universal following). And the progressive mindset seems endemic to the journalistic profession, as anyone who reads the New York Times, the New Republic, or The Nation — all of them gushing apologists for Communism during the time of its most brutal crimes in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s — knows only all too well.

To date there are still admirers of Communism who think the repression of class enemies carried out in Russia, China, Cambodia and elsewhere was a kind of regrettable accident, in no way related to the essential purpose, the very reigning doctrines, of those regimes. One departing Moscow correspondent of a major western newspaper, disappointed at the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991, "saluted" the Russian people goodbye with the perverse acclamation, "Thanks for having tried!" Or as the distasteful book dominating the current window display at Berkeley’s erstwhile "Revolution" bookstore unapologetically proclaims, Phony Communism is Dead. Long Live Real Communism!

Apologists for tyranny have never shown much ability to respect facts, even when they are shoved right in front of their faces, but then there are so many facts in The Black Book of Communism that the truth may, for once, stand a chance. Read through Nicolas Werth’s overwhelming account of Communist repression in the USSR, aptly titled "A State against Its People," and learn the names of the criminals who butchered so many of Russia’s finest and most pious citizens in cold blood. Submit to the shocking story told here by Jean-Louis Margolin of China’s "Long March into Night," especially as he describes the state-directed famine of 1959-1961, which cost as many as 40 million peasants their lives. (Even the Chinese government admits 20 million died in the brutal collectivization described by Mao’s propagandists, in classic Orwellian style, as a "Great Leap Forward" — although you’re unlikely ever to hear about this admission on CNN, which in recent years has become the media’s most enthusiastic cheerleader for the enduring Chinese Communist dictatorship). Learn about the terrifying killing fields of Cambodia, about the astonishing amount of blood on the hands of Pol Pot, who, like Ho Chi Minh — another figure whose crimes against his people are willfully ignored by American apologists — honed his Marxist theory in the salons of Paris.

Marshal these facts together, and spread the word. For too long the victims of the great Communist genocide of the 20th century have been unmourned, with apologists in America, Europe and elsewhere all but spitting on their graves by praising the regimes that murdered them. We will never learn all of the victims’ names, and, barring major political developments in Russia and in China especially, the Communists who killed them will probably never be brought to justice in the same way we settled accounts with the Nazis at Nuremberg.

But that is no reason to give up. If the truth about Communism is not told, is not repeated again and again to drown out the misinformation still spread by sympathizers who wish to preserve their utopian hopes and ideals, the risk is always present that future Lenins and Maos will hoodwink the world into complicity in their crimes. They fooled millions of us once. Let us not allow them do it again.