Anti-communist mass killings
Anti-communist mass killings are the politically motivated mass killings of communists, alleged communists, or their alleged supporters which were committed by anti-communists and political organizations or governments which opposed communism. The communist movement has faced opposition since it was founded and the opposition to it has often been organized and violent.
Many anti-communist mass killing campaigns waged during the Cold War were supported and backed by the United States and its Western Bloc allies. Some U.S.-supported mass killings, including the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 and the killings by the Guatemalan military during the Guatemalan Civil War, are considered acts of genocide.
In Nazi Germany and the countries occupied by it during World War II, anti-communism was one of the motivations for the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews, who were perceived as creators of the "Jewish Bolshevism"; during the revolutions after World War I, the "Jewish Bolshevism" conspiracy theory justified the antisemitic violence carried out by anti-communist counter-revolutionary troops in the former Russian Empire and Hungary.
Background
White Terror
White Terror is a term that was coined during the French Revolution in 1795 in order to denote all forms of counter-revolutionary violence, referring to the solid white flag of the loyalists to the French throne. Since then, historians and individual groups have both used the term White Terror in order to refer to coordinated counter-revolutionary violence in a broader sense. In the course of history, many White Terror groups have persecuted, attacked, and killed communists, alleged communists and communist-sympathizers as part of their counter-revolutionary and anti-communist agendas. Historian Christian Gerlach wrote that "when both sides engaged in terror, the 'red' terror usually paled in comparison with the 'white", and cited the crushing of the Paris Commune, the terrors of the Spanish Civil War, and the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 as examples.Americas
was ravaged by many bloody civil wars and mass killings during the 20th century. Most of these conflicts were politically motivated, or they revolved around political issues, and anti-communist mass killings were committed during several of them.Argentina
From 1976 to 1983, the military dictatorship of Argentina, the National Reorganization Process under Jorge Rafael Videla, organized the arrest and execution of between 9,000 and 30,000 civilians suspected of communism or other leftist sympathies during a period of state terror. Children of the victims were sometimes given a new identity and forcibly adopted by childless military families. Held to account in the 2000s, the perpetrators of the killings argued that their actions were a necessary part of a "war" against Communism. This campaign was part of a broader anti-communist operation called Operation Condor, which involved the repression and assassination of thousands of left-wing dissidents and alleged communists by the coordinated intelligence services of the Southern Cone countries of Latin America, which was led by Pinochet's Chile and supported by the United States.El Salvador
La Matanza
In 1932, a Communist Party-led insurrection against the Salvadoran military dictatorship of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez was brutally suppressed by the Salvadoran Armed Forces, resulting in the deaths of 30,000 peasants.Salvadoran Civil War
The Salvadoran Civil War was a conflict between the military-led government of El Salvador and a coalition of five left-wing guerrilla organizations that was known collectively as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. A coup on 15 October 1979 led to the killings of anti-coup protesters by the government as well as anti-disorder protesters by the guerrillas and it is widely seen as the tipping point toward civil war.By January 1980, the left-wing political organizations united to form the Coordinated Revolutionaries of the Masses. A few months later, the left-wing armed groups united to form the Unified Revolutionary Directorate. It was renamed the FMLN following its merger with the Communist Party in October 1980.
The full-fledged civil war lasted for more than 12 years and saw extreme violence from both sides. It also included the deliberate terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, the recruitment of child soldiers and other violations of human rights, mostly by the military. An unknown number of people "disappeared" during the conflict and the United Nations reports that more than 75,000 were killed. The United States contributed to the conflict by providing large amounts of military aid to the government of El Salvador during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
Guatemala
Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilian collaborators of the communist Guerrilla Army of the Poor at the hands of United States-backed Armed Forces of Guatemala had been widespread since 1965. It was a longstanding policy of the military regime and known by United States officials. A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". Human Rights Watch described extraordinarily cruel actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where guerrillas of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya peoples, traditionally seen as subhumans, as being supportive of the guerrillas and began a campaign of wholesale killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants. While massacres of Indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against the Indigenous population began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the Guatemalan Civil War, including at least 40,000 persons who "disappeared". Of the 42,275 individual cases of killing and "disappearances" documented by the CEH, 93% were killed by government forces. 83% of the victims were Maya and 17% Ladino.
Asia
The political and ideological struggles in Asia during the 20th century frequently involved communist movements. Anti-communist mass killings were committed on a large scale in Asia.Mainland China
The Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927 was a violent suppression of Chinese Communist Party organizations in Shanghai by the military forces of Chiang Kai-shek's conservative faction in the Kuomintang. Following the incident, the latter carried out a full-scale purge of communists in all areas under their control and even more violent suppressions occurred in cities such as Guangzhou and Changsha. The purge led to an open split between the left- and right-wings of the KMT, with Chiang Kai-shek establishing himself as the leader of the right-wing at Nanjing in opposition to the original left-wing KMT government led by Wang Jingwei in Wuhan.Before dawn on April 12, gang members began to attack district offices controlled by the union workers, including Zhabei, Nanshi and Pudong. Under an emergency decree, Chiang ordered the 26th Army to disarm the workers' militias, which resulted in more than 300 people being killed and wounded. The union workers organized a mass meeting to denounce Chiang on April 13 and thousands of workers and students went to the headquarters of the 2nd Division of the 26th Army to protest. Soldiers opened fire, killing 100 and wounding many more. Chiang dissolved the provisional government of Shanghai, labor unions and all other organizations under Communist control and he reorganized a network of unions with allegiance to the Kuomintang under the control of Du Yuesheng. Over 1,000 communists were arrested, some 300 were executed and more than 5,000 went missing. Western news reports later nicknamed General Bai "The Hewer of Communist Heads".
Some National Revolutionary Army commanders with communist backgrounds who were graduates of the Whampoa Military Academy kept their sympathies hidden and were not arrested and many of them switched their allegiance to the communists after the start of the Chinese Civil War.
The twin rival KMT governments, known as the Nanjing–Wuhan split, did not last long because the Wuhan Kuomintang also began to violently purge communists as well after its leader Wang found out about Joseph Stalin's secret order to Mikhail Borodin that the CCP's efforts were to be organized so it could overthrow the left-wing KMT and take over the Wuhan government. More than 10,000 communists in Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Changsha were arrested and executed within 20 days. The Soviet Union officially terminated its cooperation with the KMT. Wang, fearing retribution as a communist sympathizer, fled to Europe. The Wuhan Nationalist government soon disintegrated, leaving Chiang as the sole legitimate leader of the Kuomintang. In a year, over 300,000 people were killed across mainland China in the suppression campaigns carried out by the KMT.
During the Shanghai Massacre, the Kuomintang also specifically targeted women with short hair whom had not been subjected to foot binding, presuming such "non-traditional" women to be radicals. Kuomintang forces cut off their breasts, shaved their heads, and displayed their mutilated corpses in an effort to intimidate the local populace.