9Communism is deadly. Its most murderous period occurred under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Stalin. Stalin boosted the dogma's kill rate after he joined with Hitler during World War II, invading Poland and going onward from there. After Hitler's death, Stalin lived on and promoted Mao Zedong and other fellow travelers globally who added to Communism's enormous body piles. This book explores the homicidal history of communism worldwide and exposes little-known origins within the USA too. One of America's most famous socialists was Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Bellamy's flag pledge was the origin of the infamous stiff-armed salute (and other brainwashing behavior) that was borrowed decades later under German socialism and under other socialists worldwide. Francis Bellamy's cousin was the infamous Edward Bellamy, author of the international bestseller "Looking Backward." His book was advertised in conjunction with the book "Capital" by the communist Karl Marx. The Bellamy cousins wanted the government to take over all schools and education worldwide in order to promote their deadly dogma. They promoted robotic chanting by children to the flags of government in the government's schools. It was a shocking mandatory morning ritual that continues to this day (although the bizarre gesture has been changed to hide the pledge's putrid past). This is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. It is a major study that deepens our understanding of communism and poses a philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. The book's central argument, copiously documented, is that the history of communism should be read above all as the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by cruel dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot, and dozens of imitators) who were murderously drunk on their own ideology and power. Read the tabulators of the Red Terror from its inception in 1918 down to its vestigial continuation in such countries as North Korea and Cuba. This book challenges the left's deeply seated tenets that communism, despite excesses, was progressive; that Stalinism was an effect of one personality, not an entire system; and that moral indictments of communism are mitigated by the unique evil of the Nazism with which communism conspired to spread WWII. The author Ian Tinny has performed a signal service by gathering in one volume a global history of communism's crimes. He also explains astonishing discoveries from the archives of historian Dr. Rex Curry's work. The book is as important in its way as the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Black Book of Communism is enormously impressive and utterly convincing.