Anti-communist mass killings
Many anti-communist mass killing campaigns waged during the Cold War were supported and backed by the United States and its Western Bloc allies.
[8] 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.
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.
[13] The Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) 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 (FMLN).
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.
[17] The United States contributed to the conflict by providing large amounts of military aid to the government of El Salvador during the Carter[18] and Reagan administrations.
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.
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.
Before dawn on April 12, gang members began to attack district offices controlled by the union workers, including Zhabei, Nanshi and Pudong.
[26] The twin rival KMT governments, known as the Nanjing–Wuhan split (Chinese: 宁汉分裂), 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.
[28] Kuomintang forces cut off their breasts, shaved their heads, and displayed their mutilated corpses in an effort to intimidate the local populace.
[28] During the civil war between the Kuomintang and the communists, both factions committed mass violence against civilian populations and even against their own armies, with the aim of obtaining hegemony over Mainland China.
[37] The killings started in October 1965 in Jakarta, spread to Central and Eastern Java and later to Bali and smaller outbreaks occurred on parts of other islands,[38] most notably Sumatra.
The party chairman Dipa Nusantara Aidit had flown to Central Java in early October, where the coup attempt had been supported by leftist officers in Yogyakarta, Salatiga and Semarang.
[42] Declassified documents published in 2017 confirm that not only did the United States government have detailed knowledge of the massacres as they happened, it was also deeply involved in the campaign of mass killings.
[43] Historian John Roosa contends the documents show "the U.S. was part and parcel of the operation, strategizing with the Indonesian army and encouraging them to go after the PKI.
"[44] According to University of Connecticut historian Bradley R. Simpson, the documents "contain damning details that the US was willfully and gleefully pushing for the mass murder of innocent people".
[37] UCLA historian Geoffrey B. Robinson argues that without the backing of the US and other powerful Western states, the Indonesian Army's program of mass killings would not have occurred.
According to professor Kim Dong-Choon, a commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at least 100,000 people were executed on suspicion of supporting communism,[45] a figure which he called "very conservative.
[48] Thousands of people, labeled as communist sympathizers and spies, were killed by the government of Chiang Kai-shek during the White Terror (Chinese: 白色恐怖; pinyin: báisè kǒngbù) in Taiwan, a violent suppression of political dissidents following the 28 February Incident in 1947.
[49] Protests erupted on 27 February following an altercation between a group of Tobacco Monopoly Bureau agents and a Taipei resident, with protestors calling for democratic reforms and an end to corruption.
In 1920s, the government of the Kingdom of Bulgaria used the failed assassination of Tsar Boris III as a pretext to open mass hunting for leftists, both Communists and members of the Agrarian Union that continued to support the deposed Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski after the 1923 Bulgarian coup d'état.
The first concentration camp was built at Dachau in March 1933 and its original purpose was to imprison German communists, socialists, trade unionists and others who opposed the Nazis.
After the German assault on communist Russia in 1941, the Anti-Comintern Pact was renewed, with many new signatories who were from the occupied states across Europe and it was also signed by the governments of Turkey and El Salvador.
The disarmament of the communist-dominated EAM-ELAS resistance movement in the aftermath of the Treaty of Varkiza (February 1945) was followed by period of political and legal repression of leftists by the Kingdom of Greece.
Following the victory of the United Alignment of Nationalists on 1 April 1946 and until 1 May of the same year, 116 leftists were murdered, 31 injured, 114 tortured, 4 buildings were set aflame and 7 political offices were ransacked.
