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The Palgrave Handbook of
Anti-Communist Persecutions
Edited by
Christian Gerlach · Clemens Six
The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist
Persecutions
Christian Gerlach · Clemens Six
Editors
The Palgrave
Handbook
of Anti-Communist
Persecutions
Editors
Christian Gerlach Clemens Six
Institute of History Department of History
University of Bern University of Groningen
Bern, Switzerland Groningen, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-3-030-54962-6 ISBN 978-3-030-54963-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
Chapter “How Anti-Communism Disrupted Decolonization: South Korea’s State-Building
Under US Patronage” is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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Acknowledgments
This book is a collective effort to make anti-communist persecutions and their

dimensions, manifestations, and root causes in the twentieth and twenty-first
century better understood. By offering numerous regional perspectives and
thematic approaches and covering a time period much longer than the Cold
War, it provides many facets and aspects of a global complex story.
Collaborative scholarly works owe much to exchanges with a great number
of people. We, the editors, are indebted to all authors of this volume for their
contributions. Some authors worked out their chapters against the background
of great personal or professional difficulties, and we appreciate their commit-
ment and energy devoted to this collection. Not all of the contributors are
leftists or Marxists, but some are. A few of these suffered themselves from anti-
communist persecution—being arrested or compelled to leave their country—
during the time of the work on this volume. In spite of these challenges, they
persistently upheld their commitment to this project and helped to finalize
it. We also express our gratitude to the numerous librarians, archivists, and
colleagues with whom we discussed our work.
Parts of this book are based on the international conference “Anti-
communist persecutions in the 20th century,” held at the University of Bern,
Switzerland, in April 2017 organized by Christian Gerlach, Wendy Goldman,
and Clemens Six. We thank all participants in this event—authors of papers,
panel chairs, those taking part in the discussions and particularly Wendy
Goldman as co-organizer—for their valuable studies and inputs. Generous
support for the funding of this conference came from the Swiss National
Science Foundation (SNF contribution 171059), the Fondation Johanna
Dürmüller-Bol, Bern, Switzerland, and Carnegie Mellon University, Pitts-
burgh, USA. We are grateful to them and also for the infrastructural support
by the University of Bern and to those who helped with the conference organi-
zation: Moritz Feichtinger, Christian Hadorn, Daniela Heiniger, Elischa Riet-
zler, and Noemi Rui. We are also indebted to all applicants in a call for papers
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
preceding this conference, and to many colleagues who helped us with their
hints to find authors of additional chapters.
The chapters in this collection present histories from many countries around
the world. To have great diversity among the authors was also important to
us. Contributors from different backgrounds offer perspectives from a variety
of academic cultures. We feel deep gratitude for the efforts by Gregory Sax, as
language editor, to straighten out and smoothen the use of language by those
authors whose primary language is not English. Financially, his work was made
possible by the University of Bern and the Nicolaas Mulerius Foundation,
University of Groningen, for which we thank these institutions.
At Palgrave Macmillan, our work received great support by Molly Beck
and Joseph Johnson. The same goes for Scientific Publishing Services Ltd.,
particularly Shukkanthy Siva and the copy editor, during the finalization of
the manuscript—many thanks to them. Finally, we are grateful to the three
unknown peer reviewers who helped clarify some aspects and further improve
our volume.
Contents
Introduction: Anti-Communist Persecutions in the Twentieth

Century 1
Christian Gerlach
Part I Policies and Practices of Persecution
The Smith Act Trials and Systemic Violence: Anti-Communist

Persecution and Prosecution in America, 1949–1957 31
Barbara J. Falk
The Continuities and Discontinuities of Anti-Leftist State

Persecution in Modern Japan 51
Frank Jacob
Franco’s Anti-Communist Judicial System: Results

and Solutions of Spanish Transitional Justice 77
Daniel Vallès Muñío
Laboratories of the Conditio Humana: The Role

of Communism in Greek and Argentine Torture Centers
During Their Last Military Dictatorships 97
Janis Nalbadidacis
Maoist Insurgency and the State’s Counterinsurgency in India:

An Anti-Anti-Communist Historical Perspective 117
Bernard D’Mello and Gautam Navlakha
vii
viii CONTENTS
Getting Hold of a Universe of Conspirators: Anti-Communist

Panic, Fears of Subversion, and the Routine of Repression
in Senegal’s Early Postcolonial Secret Police (the Sûreté),
1962–1965 163
Alexander Keese
Part II Anti-Communism in the Context of Nation-Building,

Race and Religion
How Anti-Communism Disrupted Decolonization: South

Korea’s State-Building Under US Patronage 185
Dong-Choon Kim
Redefining the Outsider: Anti-Communist Narratives

and the Student Massacre in Tlatelolco (1968) 203
Elisa Kriza
The Black and Red Scare in the Twentieth-Century United

States 225
Robbie Lieberman
Christian Agency in Anti-Communist Persecution?

British-Malaya and Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s 245
Clemens Six
Part III Anti-Communist Persecution and New Models of

Capital Accumulation
Killing Communists: Stalinist Repression and the “Great

Terror” in the Soviet Union 265
Wendy Z. Goldman
Nation-Building as Anti-Communist Violence: The Armed

Forces in Cold War Argentina 283
James H. Shrader
CONTENTS ix
Part IV The Role of Non-State Actors
Non-state Anti-Communism and Political Violence

in Argentina and Uruguay, 1958–1973 315
Ernesto Bohoslavsky and Magdalena Broquetas
The Religious Justification of Anti-Communist Persecutions

in Greece (1920–1949) 329
Amaryllis Logotheti
From World War One to the Vanguard of Nazism? A Statistical

Approach to the History of German Paramilitarism 347
Jan-Philipp Pomplun
The Persecution of Communists in Mao’s China 363

Ning Wang
A Short History of Anti-Communist Violence in Colombia

(1930–2018): Rupture with the Past or Rebranding? 383
Andrei Gomez-Suarez
Part V Responses of the Persecuted
“So That They Leave the Prison Cage as Conscious

Revolutionaries”: How Polish Communists Used Prison 407
Padraic Kenney
Women, Communism, and Repression in Interwar Poland:

1918–1939 423
Natalia Jarska
Indonesian Narratives of Survival in and after 1965 and Their

Relation to Societal Persecution 441
Christian Gerlach
Remembering Anti-Communist Violence in Rural Society

in Indonesia: Patronage, Agricultural Transformation,
and the Legacy of Violence 459
Grace Leksana
x CONTENTS
The Left in Turkey: Emergence, Persecutions and Left-Wing

Memory Work 477
Berna Pekesen
Part VI Concluding Remarks
Anti-Communist Persecutions Between Globe-Spanning

Processes and Local Peculiarities 499
Clemens Six
Bibliography 523
Index 585
List of Contributors
Ernesto Bohoslavsky Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Los

Polvorines, Argentina
Magdalena Broquetas Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay
Bernard D’Mello Mumbai, India
Barbara J. Falk Canadian Forces College, Toronto, ON, Canada;
Royal Military College of Canada, Toronto, ON, Canada;
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Christian Gerlach Historisches Institut, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Wendy Z. Goldman Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Andrei Gomez-Suarez University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Frank Jacob Nord University, Bodø, Norway
Natalia Jarska Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Alexander Keese Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
Padraic Kenney Indiana University-Bloomington, Bloomington, USA
Dong-Choon Kim Department of Sociology, Sung Kong Hoe University,
Seoul, South Korea
Elisa Kriza University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
Grace Leksana Malang State University, Malang, Indonesia
Robbie Lieberman Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA
Amaryllis Logotheti Independent Researcher, Athens, Greece
xi
xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Janis Nalbadidacis Department of History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,

Berlin, Germany
Gautam Navlakha New Delhi, India
Berna Pekesen University Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
Jan-Philipp Pomplun Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technische
Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
James H. Shrader Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA
Clemens Six Department of History, University of Groningen, Groningen,
The Netherlands
Daniel Vallès Muñío Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Ning Wang Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada
List of Figures
Remembering Anti-Communist Violence in Rural Society in

Indonesia: Patronage, Agricultural Transformation, and the
Legacy of Violence
Fig. 1 Torture Diorama in Sacred Pancasila Monument Complex
(Photo Grace Leksana, 2006) 463
Fig. 2 The Trisula Monument in Donomulyo (Photo Grace Leksana,
2016) 475
Fig. 3 A Mass Grave in Donomulyo District (Photo Grace Leksana, 2017) 475
xiii
List of Tables
Introduction: Anti-Communist Persecutions in the Twentieth

Century
Table 1 List of major anti-communist persecutions 3
The Continuities and Discontinuities of Anti-Leftist State

Persecution in Modern Japan
Table 1 The status of unionism in Japan, December 31, 1919 62
Table 2 The increase of strikes in Japan between 1914 and 1919 63
Table 3 Tokkō arrests and prosecutions of Japanese communists
and communism-sympathizers, 1928–1937 68
From World War One to the Vanguard of Nazism? A Statistical

Approach to the History of German Paramilitarism
Table 1 Freikorps members with and without war experience 354
Table 2 Generational affiliation of the Freikorps members 356
Table 3 Freikorps members in Nazi organizations 359
xv
Introduction: Anti-Communist Persecutions
in the Twentieth Century
Christian Gerlach
In his science-fiction novel The Iron Heel of 1908, which he framed as an

account written in the twenty-seventh century, Jack London provided the
fictional history of future political struggles of a shocking magnitude between
a leftist workers’ movement in the USA and an oligarchic regime allied with
labor unions it had tamed.1 The oligarchy rules for over 300 years and claims
the lives of many hundreds of thousands of leftists, workers, and subpro-
letarians in the US, Japan, and elsewhere before the victory of the leftist
Brotherhood of Men. The novel describes a wide array of acts of oppres-
sion against the left, such as apocalyptic massacres to suppress the fictional
Chicago Commune and exterminations, with machine guns and artillery,
of whole towns; guerrilla uprisings, rural no-go areas, and the slaughter of
farmers; conspiracies, secret services, infiltrations, agents provocateurs, suspi-
cion, and terrorism by both sides; the state’s techniques of restricting domestic
movement used against leftist opponents; atrocity propaganda, courts-martial,
incarcerations, torture, forced disappearances, and legal executions; right-
wing mobs and organized paramilitaries mobilized against leftists’ facilities
and the mass conscription of citizens to hunt down and kill leftists hiding in
the countryside; deadly infighting among workers, betrayals, ostracization of
the families of political activists, the spatial segregation of social classes and
1 Jack London, The Iron Heel (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc., 1999 [first 1908]).
C. Gerlach (B)
Historisches Institut, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2020 1

C. Gerlach and C. Six (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook
of Anti-Communist Persecutions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_1
2 C. GERLACH
famines; and armed uprisings, international revolutions, and wars between

countries with different sociopolitical systems, including socialist regimes
crushed by opposing powers.
London wrote The Iron Heel with the Paris Commune and the Russian
Revolution of 1905–1907 in mind. He is credited with having anticipated
fascism, the split in the labor movement, the capitalist welfare state, and the
dominance of US anti-leftism in the Western Hemisphere.2 His novel antici-
pated much of what transpired in the twentieth century, which had just begun
when he wrote it. To be sure, he did not imagine that race and decoloniza-
tion would be factors of class conflict, the First World War, the use of punitive
camps, and many other events in the century to come. His novel was a work
of art, but it can prompt today’s thinking about historical developments, the
path-dependency of events, and roads not taken.
The Phenomenon
This book is about persecutions by anti-communists. It analyzes many of the
phenomena and practices described in The Iron Heel, including participatory
violence and various forms of government repression. Table 1 enumerates anti-
communist persecutions in the twentieth century whose bloodiness surpassed
even London’s gloomy fantasy.
As this incomplete list indicates, the magnitude of the phenomenon is
enormous. In the twentieth century, several waves of mass violence against
communists swept Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, affecting capi-
talist and socialist societies, nation-states, colonial empires, neo-colonies, and
all types of political systems from right-wing dictatorships of various kinds
to bourgeois democracies to, arguably, communist-led regimes. Moreover,
the repression often overlapped with changes of political regimes (indicating
political instability).
Such persecutions happened before, during, and after the Cold War,
decreasing but not disappearing after 20003 ; in peacetime and wartime,
including civil wars and guerrilla wars; and in economic boom times and
times of slump, although their frequency seems to increase in the downturns
of long economic cycles (Kondratiev cycles).4 Until the end of the Second
2 Part of this is in Leon Trotsky, “Jack London’s The Iron Heel ” (1937/1945) in London,
Iron Heel: v–viii.
3 At present, anti-communist persecutions claim lives in Colombia, India, the Philippines
and Turkey. On Colombia and India, see the contributions by Andrei Gomez-Suárez and
by Bernard D’Mello and Gautam Navlakha in this volume. For one statement about the
decline of anti-communist persecution, see Jean-François Fayet, “Reflections on writing
the history of anti-communism”, Twentieth Century Communism, 6 (2014): 11.
4 Assuming such downturns to have taken place 1873–1892, 1914/18–1947, 1973–1992,
and from 2008, 20 of the cases listed in Table 1 occurred largely in downturns (B-phases),
11 in A-phases, and 10 stretched over both. Whether such a global periodization makes
sense, and thus to take economic synchronization for granted, is debatable.
INTRODUCTION: ANTI-COMMUNIST PERSECUTIONS … 3
Table 1 List of major

anti-communist 1871 France (Paris Commune)*
persecutions (cases with 1905–1907 Russia, suppression of revolution
more than 100,000 dead 1917–1921 Russia, civil war*
in bold; an asterisk marks 1918–1919 Finland, civil war*
armed foreign 1918–1920 Baltic region, civil war*
intervention) 1919–1920 Hungary*
1919–1921 Germany, civil war
1922–1945 Italian fascism, including occupation in the
Balkans*
1923 Bulgaria
1927–1949 China, civil war/Japanese occupation*
1930s USSR
1936–1940s Spain, civil war*
1933–1945 Germany
1941–1945 German occupation, esp. in the USSR,
Yugoslavia, Greece*
1941–1944 Bulgarian occupation in Yugoslavia*
1942–1954 The Philippines*
1943–1949 Greece, civil war*
1945–1954 Vietnam, decolonization*
1948 Indonesia (Madiun Regency)
1948–1953 South Korea, repression, Korean War*
1948–1960 British Malaya*
1956–1959, 1962–1965, 1966–1976 Peoples’ Republic of
China
1960-? Congo/Zaire*
1961–1975 South Vietnam, civil war, US-American
occupation*
1962–1974 Portuguese Angola*
1963 Iraq
1965–1968 Indonesia
1968–1974 Portuguese Mozambique*
1969–1996 Guatemala, civil war
since 1969 The Philippines
1971–1973 Thailand
1973–1990 Chile
1975–2002 Angola, civil war*
1976–1983 Argentina
1977–1992 Mozambique, civil war*
since 1967/77 India, Naxalite guerrilla war
1979–1993 El Salvador, civil war
repeatedly, esp. since 1984 Turkey, civil war
repeatedly, esp. 1984–1991, ongoing, Columbia, civil war
(continued)
4 C. GERLACH
Table 1 (continued)
1989–1993 Peru, civil war
1996–2006 Nepal, civil war
World War, much of the repression occurred in Europe, but it moved to Asia
after 1945 and later to Africa and Latin America as well. In the last decades,
armed foreign intervention has become less common. The frequency of perse-
cution during civil wars suggests that anti-communist repression was often
part of broader political and social conflicts, with violence coming from both
or multiple sides. The number of unarmed civilians killed in these persecutions
varied from thousands to millions.
The idea for this volume originated in a panel that Wendy Goldman orga-
nized at the American Historical Association conference in New York City in
January 2015, in which Goldman, Landon Storrs, and I presented papers on
the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Second Red Scare in
the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, and the massacres in Indonesia in the 1960s,
respectively. Despite the very different geographies and historic and cultural
contexts, our papers showed that these cases had amazing similarities among
the techniques of persecution; the social practices involved; the experience of
those persecuted; the Manichean world views of the repressive regimes and
their mechanisms for banning certain ideas that were not Marxist at all; the
non-state persecutors; the expanding target groups; their social exclusion; the
pressures involved; and the evasions, revokements, denunciations, family crises,
and suicides. The commentator of that panel, Ronald Suny, recommended
that we write what he called a black book of anti-communism, alluding to the
well-known, controversial Black Book of Communism.5
We did something else. Above all, this volume forgoes the political furor of
the Black Book. Instead of presenting a catalogue of state atrocities arranged
country-by-country aiming at completeness, our collection concentrates on
the analysis of certain interrelated aspects of the phenomena of anti-communist
persecution that have not been systematically studied. Crucially, the contrib-
utors to this volume conceive of persecution and violence as at least partially
based on interactions among social groups and, thus, as complex and dynamic
conflicts.6
5 StéphaneCourtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
6 This volume is based on a conference, “Anti-communist persecutions in the 20th
century”, organized at the University of Bern in April 2017 by Wendy Goldman, Clemens
Six and this author.
The State of Research

Although an overall history of anti-communist persecution remains to be
written, some excellent research has been done. It is impossible and of little
value to enumerate all of it in this introduction; we refer readers to the bibli-
ography. But the existing scholarship has obvious limitations. Its focal point is
actually anti-communism, i.e., the history of anti-communist ideas, attitudes,
and propaganda.7 The essence of this literature’s complex findings about
how anti-communists either viewed or portrayed communists and what those
images implied can be summed up as setting social norms, calling for action,
having emotional notions, and being amorphous.8 Scholars have also studied
anti-communist organizations and the role of the mass media, though less
intensely. This kind of work is mostly about right-wing extremists, religious
groups, intellectuals, labor unions, and, often, their transnational entangle-
ments.9 Furthermore, there has been much scholarship on anti-communist
7 For example, B.A. Schabad, Die politische Philosophie des gegenwärtigen Imperialismus:
Zur Kritik der antikommunistischen Grundkonzeption (Berlin [East]: Deutscher Verlag der
Wissenschaften, 1970); Wolfgang Wippermann, Heilige Hetzjagd: Eine Ideologiegeschichte
des Antikommunismus (Berlin: Rotbuch, 2012); Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismus-
forschung (2011): 1–194; Norbert Frei and Dominik Rigoll, eds., Der Antikommunismus
in seiner Epoche: Weltanschauung und Politik in Deutschland, Europa und den USA
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017) (the subtitle is indicative). For the Federal Republik of
Germany, see Erhard Albrecht, Der Antikommunismus: Ideologie des Klerikalmilitarismus
(Berlin [East]: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1961); the habilitation thesis by
Hans Beyer, Wesen, Funktionieren, Differenzen und Formen des Antikommunismus in West-
deutschland (Leipzig: Karl-Marx-Universität, 1966); Werner Hofmann, Zur Soziologie des
Antikommunismus (Heilbronn: Distel, n.y. [1982, first published in 1967]). For France:
Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme en France, vol I:
1917–1940 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1987); Communisme, 18, 62–63 (2000): 3–206. For
Italy: Aurelio Lepre, L’anticommunismo e l’antifascismo in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1997). For Belgium: Pascal Delwit and José Gotovich, eds., La peur du rouge (Brussels:
Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1996). For Western Europe and the USA: Twentieth
Century Communism, vol. 6 (2014), A Century of Anti-Communism. The literature on
U.S. anti-communism is summed up in Marc Selverstone, “A literature so immense: The
historiography of anticommunism”, OAH Magazine of History (October 2010): 7–11; an
early critical U.S. study is by James Bristol et al., Anatomie des Antikommunismus (Olten:
Walter, 1970).
8 Hofmann, Soziologie, 15, for West Germany. An inquiry among elites in Berlin in
the 1990s seems to suggest a more differentiated, reflective, and rational kind of anti-
communism: Gesine Schwan, Antikommunismus und Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland:
Kontinuität und Wandel nach 1945 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 82, 93–99. But
Schwan does not take into account how the situation of communication (persons being
interviewed for an academic study, possibly trying to appear respectable) influenced the
formers’ responses.
9 Typical of this literature is J.B. Kaschlew et al., eds., Antikommunismus: ideologische
Hauptwaffe des Imperialismus (Berlin [East]: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratis-
chen Republik, 1974) with a longer first part „Doktrinen“ (doctrines) and a shorter
second part „Apparat“ (apparatus). The relatively best communist depiction in terms
of covering organizations, practices, geographical breadth and depth of analysis is the
collection Antikommunismus – Feind der Menschheit (Berlin [East]: Dietz, 1963). For
anti-communist organizations, see also Georges Lodygensky, Face au communisme: Quand
6 C. GERLACH
governments’ policies, secret services, and covert actions.10 This literature

has shown that anti-communism is a “polymorphous notion,” heterogeneous,
hard to delineate, “multi-faceted,” and its agents diverse to the point that
a bibliography of anti-communism has been called “impossible.”11 There is
a debate over whether “anti-communism” denotes one ideology or several
different ideologies. Anti-communists preached unity, but their organizations
were often faction-ridden and short-lived.
Many volumes about anti-communism, like those already mentioned in the
footnotes, focus on industrialized nations in Europe and North America but
claim to cover the entire phenomenon.12 To be sure, there is scholarship on
manifestations in nonindustrialized countries.13 And, in fact, it was in nonin-
dustrialized and just industrializing countries that anti-leftist persecutions were
most lethal.
Some words about the genesis of this state of research are appropriate.
Communist leaders tended to portray persecution and bloody waves of repres-
sion against their movement as inevitable but as defeats only strengthening
their movement, as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht did just before they
were assassinated. “And whether we will then still be alive [or not], when
it [the triumph of the worker’s movement] is reached, what will live is our
program,” wrote Liebknecht in an article published on the day he died.14
This sentiment was in the tradition of Marx and Engels, who held that the
persecution of communists was a futile and passing phenomenon.15 The South
African Communist Party, illegal and suppressed during the struggle against
Apartheid, printed a leaflet in July 1961 that said, referring to Marxism, “You
Genève était le centre du mouvement anticommuniste international (Geneva: Éditions

Slatkine, 2009); Klaus Körner, „Die rote Gefahr“: Antikommunistische Propaganda in der
Bundesrepublik 1950–2000 (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2003); Giles Scott-Smith,
Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale (Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Luc van Dongen, Stéphane Roulin, and Giles
Scott-Smith, eds., Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities
and Networks (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
10 One example is Becker and Berstein, Histoire: 203–234.
11 Fayet, “Reflections”: 8–21, quotes on 8 and 15 (twice), respectively.
12 This
is also true for the recent—despite its subtitle quite conventional—literature survey
by Johannes Grossmann, „Die ‚Grundtorheit unserer Epoche‘? Neue Forschungen und
Zugänge zur Geschichte des Antikommunismus“, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 56 (2016):
549–590.
13 To mention just two volumes about Indonesia: Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin, and
Annie Pohlman, eds., The Indonesian Genocide of 1965 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018);
Robert Cribb, ed., The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966 (Clayton: Monash University,
1990). See the bibliography of our volume.
14 Rosa Luxemburg, „Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin“, 14 January 1919, in: idem,
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin [East]: Dietz, 1983): 534–535; Karl Liebknecht, „Trotz
alledem!“, 15 January 1919, www.mlwerke.de/kl/kl004.htm (accessed 30 January 2019).
Both articles were published in the communist daily Die Rote Fahne (Red Flag).
15 WolfgangAdolphi, „Kommunistenverfolgung“, in: Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des
Marxismus, vol. 7/II (Berlin: Argument, 2010), 1336.
can kill people, but you cannot kill ideas.”16 More or less the same thought
was expressed by one of history’s fiercest anti-communists, Adolf Hitler.17
Communists’ disregard for individual suffering and emphasis on promoting
ideas and maintaining their organization has led to blind spots in historical
analysis.18
If it is correct that communists were the first to study the subject,19 the
noncommunists who have taken over part of it have followed their lead and
kept some of their bad habits. The main tradition, which this volume breaks
with, is that scholars have shown little interest in practices. Anti-communist
violence (which communist authors, by and large, noted and denounced but
did not analyze, perhaps because they thought that it was dysfunctionally
demoralizing to do so) has been studied in depth with regard to some coun-
tries and periods20 but much less in regard to others. That persecutors used
violence has been either explained in terms of their interests or their ideas
or both.21 Popular participation and the social environment on the ground
have also received comparatively little attention. The same goes for responses
of people persecuted as—or as if —leftists, except when their response was
heroic, organized struggle. This volume addresses these shortcomings, which
means to complement the prevailing history of anti-communism (a history of
ideas and high politics) with a history of anti-communist persecution (a history
of practices).
Also missing is systematic, transnational, and internationally comparative
research on anti-communist violence and persecution. Again, transnational
studies in the field concentrate on ideas, propaganda, and organizations
but less on violent action.22 Operation Condor, the collaboration between
16 “The Story of the Communist Party”, July 1961, https://www.google.com/url?sa=

t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjK4Ja_ic_gAh
XllYsKHdC-CskQFjACegQIBxAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpsimg.jstor.org%2Ffsi%2Fimg%
2Fpdf%2Ft0%2F10.5555%2Fal.sff.document.pam19610700.043.049_final.pdf&usg=AOv
Vaw3J8ERnA-hJENp_pf_8Gb-o (accessed 22 February 2019).
17 AdolfHitler, Mein Kampf (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999 [first 1925–
1927]), 170–171.
18 The deficiencies in communist writings about anti-communist repression may also have
had to do with the tendency toward secrecy within the communist movement, always
threatened by repression, in an effort not to give away strategies of survival and evasion.
19 As suggested by Fayet, “Reflections”: 16.
20 Thisincludes research on Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Indonesia, Argentina, Greece
and the Peoples Republic of China during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. For brief remarks
about violence against leftists, see J. Pankow et al., Antikommunismus heute (Berlin [East]:
Dietz, 1981), 93–96.
21 For a discussion of interests versus ideas, see David Pion-Berlin, The Ideology of State
Terror: Economic Doctrine and Political Repression in Argentina and Peru (Boulder and
London: Lynne Rienner, 1989), esp. 12, 17–18.
22 Seevan Dongen et al., Transnational Anti-Communism; Michael Radu, ed., The New
Insurgencies: Anti-Communist Guerrillas in the Third World (London and New York:
Routledge, 2017 [first 1990]), esp. Radu’s “Introduction”, ibid.: 1–93.
8 C. GERLACH
several Latin American regimes and the US-American government to repress

Latin American leftist movements in the 1970s, is one exception,23 one that
promotes the contested narrative of US leadership in the anti-communist
struggle during the Cold War.24 Studies of bilateral imperialist action, such as
Nazi Germany’s in the occupied Soviet territories and the USA’s in Vietnam,
are another exception. But scholarship on anti-communism usually confines
itself to national histories, whether it focuses on right-wing regimes or leftist
movements. Following existing approaches, most of the contributions in this
volume also deal with only one country; just a few compare two countries.25
Read together, however, the book allows for identifying overarching patterns,
transnational influences, and temporal clusters.
The authors of this volume have a wide spectrum of political persuasions.
They would not all agree with Ning Wang on what he calls the “savage
nature of modern Communism.”26 Scholars of anti-communist persecution
also approach their topic from different angles. Some are historians of leftist
movements or political parties. Others research right-wing movements or
regimes. And then there are scholars of violence among them, while others
are social historians, sociologists, political scientists, historians of religion, and
historians of law more generally. All of these approaches and disciplines are
represented in this volume. This prompts the question of what the study of the
persecution of communists can add to the understanding of each of these focal
points. For example, what characterized anti-communist violence as opposed
to violence against other groups, and what did they have in common? What
did its persecutions of communists mean, and do, to the often diverse polit-
ical right? Did the right tend to unify, or were its coalitions short-term, as
in Indonesia and during the Russian Civil War? What effects did persecu-
tion have on leftists, collectively and individually, and, given the wide range of
possible effects, from revolution to destruction, are there any patterns? Most
often, the outcome was leftist defeat (this is being given much prominence in
this volume), so what mechanisms were at play and what consequences did it
entail?
23 For example, see J. Patrice McSherry, “Tracing the origins of a state terror network:
Operation Condor”, Latin American Perspectives 29, 1 (2002): 38–60 and numerous
other works by the same author; David Mares, “The national security state”, in: Thomas
Holloway, ed., A Companion to Latin American History (London: Blackwell, 2011), 386–
405.
24 Apublication of this kind is Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington
Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. I
(Montréal: Black Rose, 1979). U.S. dominance is discussed and disputed in Luc van
Dongen, Stéphane Roulin, and Giles Scott-Smith, “Introduction”, in their Transnational
Anticommunism: 1–19.
25 See the chapter by Clemens Six on British Malaya and Indonesia; the chapter by Janis
Nalbadidacis on Greece and Argentina; and the chapter by Ernesto Bohoslavsky and
Magdalena Broquetas on Argentina and Uruguay.
26 See Wang’s contribution in this volume (p. 363).
Some Basic Observations

In this section, I discuss a number of crucial, intertwined issues pertaining
to the subject of our volume. It links the frequent widening of violent anti-
communist repression to other groups to broader social conflicts, which, in
turn, led to popular participation in acts of persecution. Then this section
considers the active and passive roles that leftists played in these conflicts and
the scope of their actions. Finally, I offer some reflections on international and
transnational influences on these persecutions enmeshed with social conflicts.
It is essential to realize that many of the targets of anti-communist perse-
cutions were not communists. Why were noncommunists always among the
victims? In part, the spread of violence and repression had to do with the
enormous, and dangerous, political influence that nearly everybody ascribed
to communists—whether proponents of capitalism or communists repressing
communists. This belief led to rampant, vague suspicions and the notions of
the crypto-communist, fellow traveler, or sympathizer. One could become a
victim by association with communists, by being suspected of being under
their influence, and by having acquaintances that were sympathetic to commu-
nism. No one’s privacy was respected and immune from suspicion.27 Orga-
nizations were often labeled “crypto-communist” or “communist fronts.”
Conspiracy theories were frequent, like those within the Senegalese police
apparatus described by Alexander Keese. This could lead to fiction of invisible
communists. In August 1973, Indonesia’s military regime blamed an anti-
Chinese pogrom in Bandung on communists; lacking any evidence for this
dubious claim, Admiral Sudomo argued that the communists had used an
“organization without form.”28
To its enemies, communism seemed contagious; treatments ranged from
isolation and re-education to elimination of those infected. This attitude
sometimes led to the targeting of the family members of communists from
Indonesia to Greece to the Soviet Union. In particular, children with a wrong
family background could face lifelong discrimination.29 The ultimate symbol
for this expansion of targets was the state- and Church-organized mass abduc-
tion of infants from families considered leftist, as in Argentina, Spain, and
Greece. In Spain, babies of socially marginalized mothers were stolen en masse
27 For one example, Executive Order 9835 of 1947 in the USA, see Wippermann, Hetz-
jagd: 58. For guilt by association with certain communists in der Soviet Union during the
1930s, see the contribution by Wendy Goldman in this volume.
28 Quoted in Julie Southwood and Patrick Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, Propaganda and
Terror (London: Zed, 1983), 182. And see Alexander Keese’s chapter in this volume.
29 See Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003),
73; Wendy Goldman’s chapter in this volume; Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass
Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 41; Andreas Stergiou, „Der Antikommunismus in Griechenland“, Jahrbuch für
Historische Kommunismusforschung (2011): 108. For the assassination of a son forcing his
leftist father out of his home country Argentina, see Pion-Berlin, Ideology: 88.
10 C. GERLACH
as late as 1990.30 After all, Francoist psychologists during the Spanish Civil
War (1936–1939) and afterward tried to prove that communism was either
inheritable or at least a quasi-medical predisposition of certain social groups,
including mentally disabled people, and a female psycho-pathology.31 To be
sure, communists themselves were often repressed for their convictions, rather
than their deeds, which was declared lawful in some countries,32 for it was the
personality, the (alleged) thoughts, the attitude, not necessarily the actions,
that counted.
Another explanation for the broad range of people that were caught up
in anti-communist persecutions, aside from the uncertainty who might be a
communist, or “infected” by communist thinking, was of course the intention
to spread intimidation and terror. Under the cover of anti-communism, the
organizers of persecutions were also targeting even moderately progressive
political and social movements, for example, workers, women’s, youth, peace,
civil rights’, ethno-racial emancipation, and decolonization movements, all of
which had the greatest importance in twentieth-century history. For example,
the South African Suppression of Communism Act of 26 May 1950 outlawed
any organization, “doctrine or scheme […] which aims at any political, indus-
trial, social or economic change in the Union by the promotion of disturbances
or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by the threat of such acts
and omissions, or by means which include the promotion of disturbance or
disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat.”33 This law made it possible to
target almost any undesirable group. As Friedrich Engels had already asked in
1872, in a new introduction to the Communist Manifesto, “Is there any oppo-
sition that has not been accused of communism by its opponents in power?”34
Nominally anti-communist persecution, then, as several authors in this volume
argue, also served to outlaw or ostracize certain practices, ideas, and entire
30 Ute Müller, „Über 300 000 gestohlene Babys: Erster Prozess zu organisiertem Kinder-
raub in Spanien“, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (27 June 2018): 6; Stefanie Schüler-Springorum,
„Antikommunismus in Spanien“, Frei and Rigoll, eds., Antikommunismus: 181. See the
chapters by Janis Nalbadidacis and Amaryllis Logotheti in this volume.
31 Michael Richards, “Morality and biology in the Spanish Civil War: Psychiatrists, revolu-
tion and women prisoners in Málaga”, Contemporary European History 10, 3 (2001):
395–421; Javier Bandrés and Rafael Lavona, “Psychology in Franco’s concentration
camps”, Psychology in Spain 1 (1997): 3–9.
32 Minas Samatas, “A brief history of the anticommunist surveillance in Greece and its
lasting impact”, in: Kees Boersma et al., eds., Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and
Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 50–55; for Iraq in 1938, see Tareq
Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 26.
33 South African History Online, https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/suppression-of-
communism-act%2C-act-no-44-of-1950 (accessed 26 April 2019). For similar language in
the Japanese Public Safety Maintenance Law of 1925, see the chapter by Kim Dong-Choon
in this volume.
34 Quoted in Fayet, “Reflections”: 10.
fields of thought through a combination of laws, violence, threats, and propa-

gandistic persuasion. This had enormous implications for politics and societies,
and it still has. Anti-communist persecution narrowed the permitted polit-
ical and social options, ideas, and social practices, thereby cementing existing
power structures and social hierarchies. That is, anti-communism worked for
extended periods against the plurality of ideas, identities, and groups.
One should not forget that authorities were never in full control. Persecu-
tion was a participatory process, and this social dimension also made violence
and discrimination spread. This was true in both capitalism and socialism.
Anti-communism was not limited to specific, clearly delineated groups; it
permeated large segments of society, as critics saw and one influential Soviet
analyst conceded as well.35 Many of those with anti-communist attitudes also
supported violence. According to an opinion survey in the USA in 1963, 77
percent advocated stripping communists of their US citizenship, 68 percent
wanted to deny them the right to speak in public, and 61 percent wanted
them imprisoned.36 Anti-communist persecution got some of its thrust from
such widespread social participation. In 1970, five years after the peak of the
mass murders in Indonesia, the exiled Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI)
noted, “the masses of the people do not support the PKI, even on the contrary
[…].”37
One central mechanism of public participation was denunciation, written or
spoken, including during public meetings.38 In the course of anti-communist
persecution, private feuds, arguments about unrelated issues, greed, peer pres-
sure, and ethno-religious prejudice could lead to denunciation. They could
also lead to private acts of exclusion, violence, and killing, which, in turn, could
have effects that regimes had not intended or at least did not control.39 And
such popular participation could have devastating effects on leftists. As one
author pointed out about Italian communists who returned after having been
banished by the fascists, not only did the police harass them, but they carried
35 SeeBristol et al., Anatomie: 54 and A. Rumjanzew, „Statt eines Vorworts“, in:

Antikommunismus – Feind der Menschheit: 5.
36 Bristol, Anatomie: 98.
37 „Bericht
des Auslandskomitees der KPI zum 50. Jahrestag der Gründung der KPI“ (23
May 1970), German Federal Archives, DY 30 IVA2/20/1052, page 24 of the document.
38 See the chapter by Wendy Goldman in this volume; furthermore, Wendy Goldman,
Inventing the Enemy: Denunciations and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge et al.:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 81–139; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, „Antikommu-
nismus im italienischen Faschismus“, in: Frei and Rigoll, Antikommunismus: 172.
39 See,
for example, on the Cultural Revolution in China Jean-Louis Margolin, “China:
A Long March into Night”, in: Courteois et al., Black Book: 513–538; for Indonesia
1965–1966, see Christian Gerlach, Extremely: 56–66.
12 C. GERLACH
a stigma and had difficulties finding employment and establishing social rela-
tionships.40 Though it tended to be broad, popular participation was usually
not total so that some citizens did support the persecuted.
But did communists not bring violence upon themselves? After all, many
of them were not shy about conflict, and communist parties that did not turn
to reformism sought eventually armed revolution, many through rural (and
sometimes urban) guerrilla insurgency. Certainly, this fact was not lost on anti-
communist agitators, who often cited it to legitimize harsh persecution.
However, instead of normative chicken-and-egg-discussions about what was
violence and what was “only” counterviolence, it is more fruitful to conceive
both communists and anti-communists as participants in larger social conflicts.
This understanding also sheds light on why such a wide variety of groups and
individuals only vaguely associated with communists became targets of anti-
communist violence and why others became targets of communist violence. In
Marxist theory, violence was permissible in some situations of self-defense and
otherwise in revolutionary situations that promised victory for workers and
peasants. From another perspective, a revolutionary situation marked a crisis of
society (usually more than just a political crisis), a time of instability, and a state
of flux. Such periods might involve complex phenomena like mass hunger and
inflation; during such a crisis the social role of some groups was drawn into
question, and some were degraded, for example, ethnic, racial, or religious
minorities viewed as being in some association with the left, or women and
marginal peasants, partially in situations when they tried—or seemed to try—
to improve their lot.
According to this understanding, the social conflicts here investigated were
more complicated than the opposition of two clearly defined classes (such as
workers and bourgeoisie). It is not accidental that Table 1 includes so many
civil and guerrilla wars. Many of these civil wars had more than two sides
and illustrate social fragmentation. They were struggles but not simple binary
ones. For example, Kim Dong-Choon describes the situation in South Korea
from 1948 to 1953 as a civil war, which included aspects of what is called the
Korean War.41 Likewise, China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the
late 1960s, which has often been interpreted as a conflict in the Communist
Party,42 can also be regarded as a conflict within the intelligentsia and as a
broader social conflict that has occasionally been called a civil war.43
40 Osti Guerrazzi, „Antikommunismus“: 171.

41 See
Dong-Choon Kim, “Forgotten war, forgotten massacres—The Korean War (1950–
1953) as licensed mass killing”, Journal of Genocide Research 6, 4 (2004): 523–544.
42 See the chapter by Ning Wang in this volume, who also points to violent factionalism
within the CPCh before it took power in 1949.
43 Margolin, “China”: 532. Members of the intelligentsia (including Communist Party
functionaries and civil servants) were prominent among those targeted; on the other hand,
for people belonging to the intelligentsia among the Red Guards, see Anita Chan, Stanley
Rosen, and Jonathan Unger, “Students and class warfare: The social roots of Red Guard
Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton)”, China Quarterly 83 (1980): 434. Thanks to Mirjam
Wiedemar for pointing me to this publication.
In capitalist countries, communists did not usually create such social crises,
although they did make use of, and sometimes exacerbated, them. Like others,
they were active, and some were violent, participants. Frequently, their oppo-
nents were not only governments but also non-state groups, who were very
often mobilized by baseless or hugely exaggerated atrocity propaganda. In
reality, when both sides engaged in terror, the “red” terror usually paled
in comparison with the “white” (as was the case in the Paris Commune in
1871; the civil wars in Russia, Germany, and Hungary from 1918 to 1921;
the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939; and Indonesia in 1965–1966).44 Such
social crises, and the frequent participation of non-state agents in the persecu-
tion and targeting of noncommunists, make the perspective of social history
so important.
What was it like to be persecuted under the banner of anti-communism?
In certain respects, our knowledge is limited. Scholarship has focused on the
experiences of prominent communists and other leftists, rather than on ordi-
nary people caught up in the process. In many countries, it was primarily
highly educated people who were interviewed at length or left other sources.
Illiterate peasants and workers without school degree had less opportunity
to have their memories read or heard. What one can say is that there was a
tendency for people exposed to mechanisms of exclusion and isolation under
anti-communist repression to struggle in various ways for re-inclusion.
Because of its focus on the history of its own political organization, Marxist
scholarship on the persecution of communists has contributed little to a
social-historical analysis. One often learns from official party histories that
there were hard struggles; notably, the concept of struggle made persecution
seem inevitable, even a matter of honor. In his memoirs (written during his
imprisonment in 1974 under Pinochet’s regime), Luis Corvalán, the former
chairman of the Communist Party of Chile, described his earlier disagreement
with a high party official who argued, “our main concern should be to fight,
but without this causing more victims,” Corvalán holding “there is no struggle
without victims, without a certain number of fighters who fall under the assault
of the enemy.”45 Even if these were not exactly the words used, Corvalán’s
portrayal represents a well-established way of thinking, related to organized
struggle, which marginalized other responses to repression.
Did the individual matter to a communist party, or was preserving the orga-
nization the only important issue? Asking this question puts the occasionally
criticized instructions that the Communist Party of Indonesia issued in 1965,
a party with a rich experience in being violently repressed, in a different light:
“find your own escape, say you know nothing, you don’t know each other
44 Concerning Paris, see John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris
Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
45 Luis Corvalán, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin [East]: Dietz, 1978), 107 (my translation from
German, C.G.).
14 C. GERLACH
and have no connection to each other.”46 This led to factual dissolution,

but can be read as an example of a communist party protecting its members
for their own sake. Though rare, protecting its members was not unique to
Indonesia; in May 1950, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
South Africa dissolved the party, assuming, inter alia, that “the rank-and-file of
the party would not be ready or in a position to bear the dangers and difficul-
ties of illegal activity.” However, according to the same communist author who
reported this, most members carried on with the collective struggle anyway,
founding the South African Communist Party in 1953.47
Illegality and persecution were common experiences. A brief history of
communist parties in 33 African and Asian countries notes that only three
(those in India, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and Cyprus) were never banned before
1980.48 And the history of the Iraqi Communist Party has been portrayed as a
long series of mass arrests, mass torture, and executions in 1948–1949, 1958–
1960, 1963, 1965–1966, 1970, and 1983.49 On a personal level, this could
result in life stories of hardship in many, and twisted, ways. For example, after
some years in Sweden, also during the first years of Nazi rule, the German-
born communist Eva Siao lived through the Soviet terror of the 1930s and the
Cultural Revolution in China, where she spent seven years in solitary confine-
ment.50 Ariel Dorfman fled from anti-leftist regimes four times: Peron’s
Argentina in 1945, the McCarthyist USA in 1954 (as a child), Pinochet’s
Chile in 1973, and Argentina in the same year after Peron had again taken
over and leftists became targets of paramilitary violence.51 It is no accident
that such examples need to be taken from autobiographies. Writers of fiction
also described the experiences of persecuted communists while party histo-
ries said little. Less speculative than Jack London, the Japanese novelist Takiji
Kobayashi wrote a nuanced fictionalized account of arrest and torture based
on the actual anti-communist mass arrest of 1600 people on 15 March 1928
(when the Japanese Communist Party had only about 400 members). The
book also depicted the many ways in which affected people reacted. Kobayashi
was a fast worker, and his short novel was published, heavily censored, in late
46 Quoted in Ibu Marni, “I am a Leaf in the Storm”, Indonesia 47 (1989): 56.

47 A. Lerumo [i.e. Michael Harmel], Fünfzig Jahre Kampf der Südafrikanischen Kommu-
nistischen Partei 1921–1971 (Berlin [East]: Dietz: 1973), 160 (quote, retranslated from
German, C.G.), 169.
48 EmilLanger et al., Entwicklung und Kampf der kommunistischen Bewegung in Asien und
Afrika (Berlin [East]: Dietz, 1980), 122. But see the contribution by Bernard D’Mello
and Gautam Navlakha about India in this volume.
49 Ismael, Rise and Fall, ix, 40, 79, 98, 102, 107–108, 112, 142, 201, 225–226. On the
other hand, see ibid., 87 and 91 for mass killings supported and possibly committed by
communists in Kirkuk in July 1959.
50 Eva Siao, China – mein Traum, mein Leben (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 1990),
57–64, 301–364.
51 See
Ariel Dorfman, Kurs nach Süden, Blick nach Norden: Leben zwischen zwei Welten
(Munich and Vienna: Europa, 1999).
1928. In April 1932, Kobayashi went into hiding, and four months later he
finished his short novel Life of a Party Member about living underground. It
portrays strategies of illegal life, intense police espionage, and how the pres-
sures during illegal life limits and deforms human relationships for an activist
(who, for example, ruthlessly exploits a woman who hides him). When the
novel came out in the spring of 1933, Kobayashi was no longer alive, having
been tortured to death by the Special Higher Police.52 His analysis of persecu-
tion is incisive. The organization of proletarian-revolutionary Japanese writers
to which Kobayashi had belonged fell apart in 1933, after fierce repression led
about 500 members to recant their allegiance to communism.53
Because of our understanding of anti-communist persecution as occurring
within social conflicts, this volume places less weight on foreign involvement
than some others do. Intercessions that it does discuss include US-American
influence on Mexico’s repression of leftists 1968, German paramilitaries’
murders of communists in the Baltic countries in 1919, British colonial
violence in Malaya from 1948 to 1960, and the USA’s neocolonial interven-
tion in Korea between 1945 and 1953.54 A case not discussed here is British
and US-American support of the coup in Iraq in 1963, in which Saddam
Hussein played a major role, which involved massacres of communists. US-
American authorities provided lists of communists to be targeted, as they did
in support of Indonesia’s massacres in 1965.55
Multilateral efforts to combat communism are also not prominent in this
book for they weren’t very important.56 Except for the Anti-Comintern Pact
of 1936–1945, there were extensive anti-leftist networks but no real anti-
communist Internationale as an interstate organization.57 Even with some
52 See Takiji Kobayashi, “March 15, 1928”, in: Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field,
eds., For Dignity, Justice and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 103–158; Takiji Kobayashi,
“Life of a party member”, in: idem, The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 221–293. For the context see Yoichi
Komori, “Introduction”, in: Kobayashi, Crab Cannery Ship: 6 and 13, and Bowen-Struyk
and Field, Dignity: 47, 103 and 329.
53 See ibid.: 331 and 364.
54 See
the chapters by Elena Kriza, Jan-Philipp Pomplun, Clemens Six, and Kim Dong-
Choon in this volume.
55 See Mark Curtis, “The massacres in Iraq, 1963”, 12 February 2007, available on Curtis’
webside, http://markcurtis.info/2007/02/12/the-massacres-in-iraq-1963/ and Gerlach,
Extremely: 77–87.
56 For such efforts, see Iris Schröder and Christian Methfessel, „Antikommunismus und
Internationalismus“, in: Frei and Rigoll, Antikommunismus: 139–155.
57 This becomes also clear from Giles Scott-Smith, Western Anti-Communism and
the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), despite the book’s subtitle. NATO did not play this role, see van
Dongen et al., “Introduction”: 5. The Anti-Comintern Pact has yet to become subject
to in-depth research. It was an aggressive alliance, but a loose one, and almost half of its
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themselves and their resources, by what he has now accomplished—
where it is most difficult to accomplish any thing—among his own
countrymen: and most devoutly does he pray, that if they should, they
may be more fortunate, and far more generously rewarded, than he has
ever been; and if they should not, he advises them to go where he has
been already—and trust to another people for that, which his own have
not the heart to give him, however well he may deserve it. Abroad—if he
do not get a chaplet of fire and greenness—he will, at least, get a cup of
cold water,—and it may be, a tear or two of compassion, if nothing of
encouragement—whatever he may do. At home—he may wear himself
out—like one ashamed of what he is doing, in secrecy and darkness—
exhaust his own heart of all its power and vitality, by pouring himself into
the hearts of others—with a certainty that he will be called a madman, a
beggar and a fool, for his pains—unless he persevere, in spite of a broken
heart, and a broken constitution, till he shall have made his own
countrymen ashamed of themselves, and afraid of him.
It is a sad thing to say good by’e, even for an author. If you mean what
you say—it is a prayer as well as a blessing, an audible breathing of the
heart. And if you do not—it is a wicked profanation. So far, reader, you
have been the familiar companion of the author; and you may be one of
those, who have journied with him before, for many a weary day, through
much of his wandering and meditation:—that is, you may be one of those
who, having been admitted before, to touch his heart with a naked hand—
have felt in one pulsation—in one single hour’s fellowship with it, all that
he had felt and thought for many a weary year. You have been with him to
a more holy place than the fire-side; to him, more like the invisible
creatures—for he hath never seen your face, and peradventure never
may, though you have been looking into his very soul—that hover about
the chamber of prayer—the solitude of the poet—or the haunted place
under the shadow of great trees, where the wearied man throws himself
down, to muse upon the face of his Creator, which he sees in the sky over
him, or beneath the vast blue water before him. Is it wonderful therefore
that there should be a little seriousness about his brow—although ye are
invisible to him—when he is about to say farewell to you—farewell forever
—without having once heard the tone of your voice—nor one of the many
tears, that you may have dropped over him, when you thought yourself
altogether alone:—
Nor can he look back, without some emotion, upon the labour that he has
undergone, even within that flowery wilderness, where he hath been
journeying with you, or lying and ruminating all alone, for so long a time;
and out of which, he is now about to emerge—forever—with a strong
tread, to the broad blue sky and the solid earth; nor without lamenting that
he cannot go barefooted—and half-naked among men;—and that the
colour and perfume—the dim enchantment, and the sweet, breathing,
solemn loneliness of the wild-wood path, that he is about to abandon, for
the broad dusty highway of the world, are so unpropitious to the
substantial reputation of a man: nor, without grieving that the blossom-
leaves, and the golden flower-dust, which now cover him, from head to
foot, must be speedily brushed away;—and that the scent of the
wilderness may not go with him—wherever he may go—wandering
through the habitation of princes—the courts of the living God—or, the
dwelling places of ambition—yea, even into the grave.
* * * * *
I have but one other request to make. Let these words be engraven
hereafter on my tomb-stone: “Who reads an American Book?”
RACHEL DYER.
The early history of New-England, or of Massachusetts Bay, rather;

now one of the six New-England States of North America, and that
on which the Plymouth settlers, or “Fathers” went ashore—the
shipwrecked men of mighty age, abounds with proof that witchcraft
was a familiar study, and that witches and wizards were believed in
for a great while, among the most enlightened part of a large and
well-educated religious population. The multitude of course had a
like faith; for such authority governs the multitude every where, and
at all times.
The belief was very general about a hundred years ago in every part
of British America, was very common fifty years ago, when the
revolutionary war broke out, and prevails now, even to this day in the
wilder parts of the New-England territory, as well as in the new
States which are springing up every where in the retreating shadow
of the great western wilderness—a wood where half the men of
Europe might easily hide from each other—and every where along
the shores of the solitude, as if the new earth were full of the seed of
empire, as if dominion were like fresh flowers or magnificent
herbage, the spontaneous growth of a new soil wherever it is
reached by the warm light or the cheerful rain of a new sky.
It is not confined however, nor was it a hundred and thirty five years
ago, the particular period of our story, to the uneducated and
barbarous, or to a portion of the white people of North-America, nor
to the native Indians, a part of whose awful faith, a part of whose
inherited religion it is to believe in a bad power, in witchcraft spells
and sorcery. It may be met with wherever the Bible is much read in
the spirit of the New-England Fathers. It was rooted in the very
nature of those who were quite remarkable in the history of their age,
for learning, for wisdom, for courage and for piety; of men who fled
away from their fire-sides in Europe to the rocks of another world—
where they buried themselves alive in search of truth.
We may smile now to hear witchcraft spoken seriously of; but we
forget perhaps that a belief in it is like a belief in the after
appearance of the dead among the blue waters, the green graves,
the still starry atmosphere and the great shadowy woods of our
earth; or like the beautiful deep instinct of our nature for worship,—
older than the skies, it may be, universal as thought, and sure as the
steadfast hope of immortality.
We may turn away with a sneer now from the devout believer in
witches, wondering at the folly of them that have such faith, and
quite persuading ourselves in our great wisdom, that all who have
had it heretofore, however they may have been regarded by ages
that have gone by, were not of a truth wise and great men; but we
forget perhaps that we are told in the Book of Books, the Scriptures
of Truth, about witches with power to raise the dead, about wizards
and sorcerers that were able to strive with Jehovah’s anointed high
priest before the misbelieving majesty of Egypt, with all his court and
people gathered about his throne for proof, and of others who could
look into futurity with power, interpret the vision of sleep, read the
stars, bewitch and afflict whom they would, cast out devils and
prophesy—false prophets were they called, not because that which
they said was untrue, but because that which they said, whether true
or untrue, was not from above—because the origin of their
preternatural power was bad or untrue. And we forget moreover that
laws were made about conjuration, spells and witchcraft by a body of
British lawgivers, renowned for their sagacity, deep research, and
grave thoughtful regard for truth, but a few years ago—the other day
as it were—and that a multitude of superior men have recorded their
belief in witchcraft—men of prodigious power—such men as the
great and good Sir Matthew Hale, who gave judgment of death upon
several witches and wizards, at a period when, if we may believe a
tithe of what we hear every day of our lives, from the mouth of many
a great lawyer, there was no lack of wit or wisdom, nor of knowledge
or faithful enquiry; and such men too as the celebrated author of the
Commentaries on the Laws of England, which are, “as every body
knows, or should know, and a man must be exceedingly ignorant not
to know” the pride of the British empire and a pillar of light for the
sages of hereafter; and that within the last one hundred and fifty or
two hundred years, a multitude of men and women have been tried
and executed by authority of British law, in the heart of England, for
having dealt in sorcery and witchcraft.
We may smile—we may sneer—but would such things have
occurred in the British Parliament, or in the British courts of law,
without some proof—whatever, it was—proof to the understandings
of people, who in other matters are looked up to by the chief men of
this age with absolute awe—that creatures endowed with strange, if
not with preternatural power, did inhabit our earth and were able to
work mischief according to the popular ideas of witchcraft and
sorcery?
We know little or nothing of the facts upon which their belief was
founded. All that we know is but hearsay, tradition or conjecture.
They who believed were eye-witnesses and ear witnesses of what
they believed; we who disbelieve are neither. They who believed
knew all that we know of the matter and much more; we who
disbelieve are not only ignorant of the facts, but we are living afar off,
in a remote age. Nevertheless, they believed in witchcraft, and we
regard all who speak of it seriously, with contempt. How dare we!
What right have we to say that witches and witchcraft are no more,
that sorcery is done with forever, that miracles are never to be
wrought again, or that Prophecy shall never be heard again by the
people of God, uplifting her voice like a thousand echoes from the
everlasting solitudes of the sea, or like uninterrupted heavy thunder
breaking over the terrible and haughty nations of our earth?
Why should we not think as well of him who believes too much, as of
him who believes too little? Of him whose faith, whatever it may be,
is too large, as of him whose faith, whatever it may be, is too small?
Of the good with a credulous temper, as of the great with a
suspicious temper? Of the pure in heart, of the youthful, of the
untried in the ways of the world, who put much faith in whatever they
are told, too much it may be, as of them who being thoroughly tried
in the ways of the world put no faith in what they hear, and little in
what they see? Of the humble in spirit who believe, though they do
not perfectly understand, as of the haughty who will not believe
because they do not perfectly understand? Of the poor child who
thinks a juggler eats fire when he does not, as of the grown-up sage
who thinks a juggler does not swallow a sword when he does? Of
the believer in Crusoe, who sits poring over the story under a hedge,
as of the unbeliever in Bruce who would not believe, so long as it
was new, in the Tale of Abyssinia? Of those in short who are led
astray by self-distrust, or innocence, or humility, as of them who are
led astray by self-conceit, or corruption, or pride?
In other days, the Lion of the desert would not believe the horse
when he came up out of the bleak north, and told a story of waters
and seas that grew solid, quiet and smooth in the dead of winter. His
majesty had never heard of such a thing before, and what his
majesty had never heard of before could not be possible. The mighty
lord of the Numedian desert could not believe—how could he?—in a
cock-and-a-bull-story, about ice and snow; for to him they were both
as a multitude of such things are to the philosophy of our age, out of
the course of nature.
A solid sea and a fluid earth are alike to such as have no belief in
what is new or contrary to that course of nature with which they are
acquainted—whatever that may be. There is no such thing as proof
to the over-wise or over mighty, save where by reason of what they
already know, there is not much need of other proof.—They would
not believe, though one should rise from the dead—they are too
cautious by half; they are not satisfied with any sort of testimony;
they dare not believe their own eyes—they do not indeed; for
spectres when they appear to the eye of the philosopher now, are
attributed altogether to a diseased organ.[3] They care not for the
cloud of witnesses—they withdraw from the Bible, they scoff at
history, and while they themselves reject every kind of proof,
whatever it may be, such proof as they would be satisfied with in a
case of murder, were they to hear it as a jury—such proof as they
would give judgment of death upon, without fear, proof under oath by
men of high character and severe probity, eye-witnesses and ear-
witnesses of what they swear to—they ridicule those who undertake
to weigh it with care, and pursue with scorn or pity those who shiver
through all their arteries at a story of the preternatural.
[3] As by the printer of Berlin. See also Beasley’s Search after
Truth.
As if it were a mark of deplorable fatuity for a babe to believe now as
a multitude of wise and great and gifted men have heretofore
believed in every age of the world! As if to think it possible for such to
have been right in their belief, were too absurd for excuse now—
such men as the holy Greek, the upright immovable Socrates, who
persuaded himself that he was watched over by a sort of household
spirit; such men too as the “bald” Cæsar, and the rock-hearted
Brutus, both of whom spite of their imperial nature and high place
among the warlike and mighty of their age, believed in that, and
shook before that which whether deceitful or not, substance or
shadow, the very cowards of our day are too brave to be scared with,
too full of courage to put their trust in—afraid as they are of that,
which the Roman pair would have met with a stern smile and a free
step; such men too of a later age, as the profound, wise and pure Sir
Matthew Hale, who put many to death for witchcraft—so clear was
the proof, and so clear the nature of the crime—while the nature of
larceny, the nature of common theft was forever a mystery to him, if
we may believe what we hear out of his own mouth; such men too as
the celebrated Judge Blackstone, who after a thorough sifting of the
law, says—“It seems to be most eligible to conclude that in general
there has been such a thing as witchcraft, though we cannot give
credit to any particular modern instance of it;” such men too as
Doctor Samuel Johnson, L. L. D. who saw through all the hypocricy
and subterfuge of our day, when he said, speaking of a superstitious
belief, that men who deny it by their words, confess it by their fears—
nothing was ever so true! we who are most afraid, want courage to
own it; such men too as the Lord Protector of England, while she
was a commonwealth; and such as he, the Desolator—
“........... From whose reluctant hand,

The thunder-bolt was wrung”—
for they were both believers in what the very rabble of our earth
deride now; such men, too, as the chief among poets—Byron—for
he believed in the words of a poor old gypsey, and shook with fear,
and faltered on the way to his bridal-chamber, when he thought of
the prophecy she had uttered years and years before, in the morning
of his haughty youth; such men too as the head lawgiver of our day,
the High-Priest of Legislation, the great and good, the benevolent,
the courageous Bentham, who to this hour is half afraid in the dark,
and only able to satisfy himself about the folly of such fear, when his
night-cap is off, by resorting with suitable gravity to his old refuge,
the exhaustive mode of reasoning. If a ghost appear at all, argues
he, it must appear either clothed or not clothed. But a ghost never
appears not clothed, or naked; and if it appear clothed, we shall have
not only the ghost of a human creature—which is bad enough; but
the ghost of a particular kind of cloth of a particular fashion, the
ghost of a pocket-handkerchief, or a night-cap—which is too bad.
Thus much for authority: and here, but for one little circumstance we
should take up our narrative, and pursue it without turning to the right
or the left, until we came to the sorrowful issue; but as we may have
here and there a reader, in this unbelieving age, who has no regard
for authority, nor much respect for the wisdom of our ancestors, what
if we try to put the whole argument into a more conclusive shape? It
may require but a few pages, and a few pages may go far to allay
the wrath of modern philosophy. If we throw aside the privilege of
authorship, and speak, not as a multitude but as one of the true faith,
our argument would stand thus:
In a word, whatever the philosophy of our age may say, I cannot look
upon witchcraft and sorcery as the unbeliever does. I know enough
what the fashion is now; but I cannot believe, I do not believe that we
know much more of the matter than our great progenitors did; or that
we are much wiser than a multitude who have been for ages, and
are now, renowned for their wisdom; or that we are much more pious
than our noble fathers were, who died in their belief—died for their
belief, I should say, and are a proverb to this hour on account of their
piety. Nor can I persuade myself that such facts would be met with in
grave undoubted history, if they were untrue, as are to be met with in
every page of that which concerns the period of our story; facts
which go to prove not only that a fixed belief in witchcraft prevailed
throughout Europe as well as America, and among those with whom
there was no lack of probity or good sense, or knowledge, it would
appear; but that hundreds of poor creatures were tried for witchcraft
under the authority of British law, and put to death, under the
authority of British law, (and several after confession) for the practice
of witchcraft and sorcery.
May it not be worth our while therefore, to speak seriously and
reverently of our mighty forefathers? to bear in mind that the proof
which they offer is affirmative and positive, while that which we rely
upon, is negative—a matter of theory? to keep in view, moreover,
that if a body of witnesses of equal worth were equally divided, one
half saying that on such a day and hour, at such a place, when they
were all together, such or such a thing, preternatural or not,
mysterious or not, occurred; while the other half say positively, man
for man, that so far as they heard or saw, or know or believe, no
such thing did occur, at such a time or place, or at any other time or
place, whatsoever—still, even here, though you may believe both
parties, though you may give entire credit to the words of each, you
may be justified, in a variety of cases, in acting upon the testimony of
the former in preference to that of the latter. And why? Because the
contradictory words of both may not be so contradictory as they
appear—not so contradictory as to neutralize each other on every
hypothesis; but may be reconcilable to the supposition that such or
such a fact, however positively denied by one party, and however
mysterious it may seem, really did occur: and this while they are not
reconcilable to the supposition that such or such a fact really did not
occur.—It being much more easy to overlook that which is, than to
see that which is not; much more easy to not see a shadow that falls
upon our pathway, than to see a shadow where indeed there is no
shadow; much more easy to not hear a real voice, than to hear no
voice.
If the multitude of trustworthy and superior men, therefore, who
testify to the facts which are embodied in the following narrative, and
which may appear incredible to the wise of our day, or out of the
course of nature to the philosophy of our day, like ice or snow to the
Lord of the Desert; if they were positively contradicted step by step,
throughout, by another like multitude of trustworthy and superior men
—still, though the two parties were alike numerous and alike worthy
of credit, and although you might believe the story of each, and
every word of it, and give no preference to either:—Still I say, you
might be justified in supposing that after all, the facts which the
former testify to really did occur. And why? Because though both
speak true, that hypothesis may still be supported; while if both
speak true, the contrary hypothesis cannot be supported. Facts may
occur without being heard or seen by the whole of a party who are
together at the time they occur: but how are they to be seen or
heard, if they do not occur at all?
I have put a much stronger case than that on which the truth of the
following story is made to depend; for no such contradiction occurs
here, no such positive testimony, no such array of multitude against
multitude of the same worth, or the same age, or the same people.
On the affirmative side are a host here—a host of respectable
witnesses, not a few of whom sealed their testimony with their blood;
on the negative, hardly one either of a good or a bad character. What
appears on the negative side is not by facts, but by theory. It is not
positive but conjectural. The negative witnesses are of our age and
of our people; the affirmative were of another age and of another
people. The former too, it should be remarked were not only not
present, but they were not born—they were not alive, when the
matters which they deny the truth of, took place—if they ever took
place at all. Now, if oaths are to be answered by conjecture,
bloodshed by a sneer, absolute martyrdom by hypothesis, much
grave testimony of the great and the pious, by a speculative
argument, a brief syllogism, or a joke—of what use are the rules by
which our trust in what we hear is regulated? our faith whatever it
may be, and whether it concern this world or the next, and whether it
be of the past, the present or the future? Are we to believe only so
far as we may touch and see for ourselves? What is the groundwork
of true knowledge? where the spirit of true philosophy? Whither
should we go for proof; and of what avail is the truth which we are
hoarding up, the truth which we are extracting year after year by
laborious investigation, or fearful experiment? If we do not believe
those who go up to the altar and make oath before the Everlasting
God, not as men do now, one after another, but nation by nation, to
that which is very new to us, or wonderful, why should posterity
believe us when we testify to that which hereafter may be very new
to them or very wonderful? Is every day to be like every other day,
every age like every other age in the Diary of the Universe?
Earthquake, war and revolution—the overthrow of States and of
empires, are they to be repeated forever, lest men should not believe
the stories that are told of them?
CHAPTER II.
But enough. It is quite impossible to doubt the sincerity of the
Plymouth settlers, the Pilgrims, or Fathers of New-England, who
escaping over sea laid the foundations of a mighty empire on the
perpetual rocks of New-Plymouth, and along the desolate shores of
a new world, or their belief in witchcraft and sorcery, whatever we
may happen to believe now; for, at a period of sore and bitter
perplexity for them and theirs, while they were yet wrestling for life,
about four hundred of their hardy brave industrious population were
either in prison for the alleged practice of witchcraft, or under
accusation for matters which were looked upon as fatal evidence
thereof. By referring to the sober and faithful records of that age, it
will be found that in the course of about fifteen months, while the
Fathers of New-England were beset on every side by the
exasperated savages, or by the more exasperated French, who led
the former through every part of the British-American territory,
twenty-eight persons received sentence of death (of which number
nineteen were executed) one died in jail, to whom our narrative
relates, and one was deliberately crushed to death—according to
British law, because forsooth, being a stout full-hearted man, he
would not make a plea, nor open his mouth to the charge of sorcery,
before the twelve, who up to that hour had permitted no one who did
open his mouth to escape; that a few more succeeded in getting
away before they were capitally charged; that one hundred and fifty
were set free after the outcry was over; and that full two hundred
more of the accused who were in great peril without knowing it, were
never proceeded against, after the death of the individual whose
character we have attempted a sketch of, in the following story.
Of these four hundred poor creatures, a large part of whom were
people of good repute in the prime of life, above two-score made
confession of their guilt—and this although about one half, being
privately charged, had no opportunity for confession. The laws of
nature, it would seem were set aside—if not by Jehovah, at least by
the judges acting under the high and holy sanction of British law, in
this day of sorrow; for at the trial of a woman who appears to have
been celebrated for beauty and held in great fear because of her
temper, both by the settlers and the savages, three of her children
stood up, and children though they were, in the presence of their
mother, avowed themselves to be witches, and gave a particular
account of their voyages through the air and over sea, and of the
cruel mischief they had perpetrated by her advice and direction; for
she was endowed, say the records of the day, with great power and
prerogative, and the Father of lies had promised her, at one of their
church-yard gatherings that she should be “Queen of Hell.”
But before we go further into the particulars of our narrative which
relates to a period when the frightful superstition we speak of was
raging with irresistible power, a rapid review of so much of the earlier
parts of the New-England history, as immediately concerns the
breaking out, and the growth of a belief in witchcraft among the
settlers of our savage country, may be of use to the reader, who, but
for some such preparation, would never be able to credit a fiftieth
part of what is undoubtedly true in the following story.
The pilgrims or “Fathers” of New-England, as they are now called by
the writers of America, were but a ship-load of pious brave men, who
while they were in search of a spot of earth where they might
worship their God without fear, and build up a faith, if so it pleased
him, without reproach, went ashore partly of their own accord, but
more from necessity, in the terrible winter of 1620-21, upon a rock of
Massachusetts-Bay, to which they gave the name of New-Plymouth,
after that of the port of England from which they embarked.
They left England forever.... England their home and the home of
their mighty fathers—turned their backs forever upon all that was
dear to them in their beloved country, their friends, their houses, their
tombs and their churches, their laws and their literature with all that
other men cared for in that age; and this merely to avoid persecution
for a religious faith; fled away as it were to the ends of the earth,
over a sea the very name of which was doubtful, toward a shore that
was like a shadow to the navigators of Europe, in search of a place
where they might kneel down before their Father, and pray to him
without molestation.
But, alas for their faith! No sooner had these pilgrims touched the
shore of the new world, no sooner were they established in
comparative power and security, than they fell upon the Quakers,
who had followed them over the same sea, with the same hope; and
scourged and banished them, and imprisoned them, and put some to
death, for not believing as the new church taught in the new world.
Such is the nature of man! The persecuted of to-day become the
persecutors of to-morrow. They flourish, not because they are right,
but because they are persecuted; and they persecute because they
have the power, not because they whom they persecute are wrong.
The quakers died in their belief, and as the great always die—
without a word or a tear; praying for the misguided people to their
last breath, but prophecying heavy sorrow to them and to theirs—a
sorrow without a name—a wo without a shape, to their whole race
forever; with a mighty series of near and bitter affliction to the judges
of the land, who while they were uttering the words of death to an
aged woman of the Quakers, (Mary Dyer) were commanded with a
loud voice to set their houses in order, to get ready the accounts of
their stewardship, and to prepare with the priesthood of all the earth,
to go before the Judge of the quick and the dead. It was the voice of
Elizabeth Hutchinson, the dear and familiar friend of Mary Dyer. She
spoke as one having authority from above, so that all who heard her
were afraid—all! even the judges who were dealing out their
judgment of death upon a fellow creature. And lo! after a few years,
the daughter of the chief judge, before whom the prophecy had been
uttered with such awful power, was tried for witchcraft and put to
death for witchcraft on the very spot (so says the tradition of the
people) where she stayed to scoff at Mary Dyer, who was on her way
to the scaffold at the time, with her little withered hands locked upon
her bosom ... her grey head lifted up ... not bowed in her
unspeakable distress ... but lifted up, as if in prayer to something
visible above, something whatever it was, the shadow of which fell
upon the path and walked by the side of the aged martyr; something
whatever it was, that moved like a spirit over the green smooth turf ...
now at her elbow, now high up and afar off ... now in the blue, bright
air; something whose holy guardianship was betrayed to the
multitude by the devout slow motion of the eyes that were about to
be extinguished forever.
Not long after the death of the daughter of the chief judge, another
female was executed for witchcraft, and other stories of a similar
nature were spread over the whole country, to prove that she too had
gone out of her way to scoff at the poor quaker-woman. This
occurred in 1655, only thirty-five years after the arrival of the Fathers
in America. From this period, until 1691, there were but few trials for
witchcraft among the Plymouth settlers, though the practice of the art
was believed to be common throughout Europe as well as America,
and a persuasion was rooted in the very hearts of the people, that
the prophecy of the quakers and of Elizabeth Hutchinson would
assuredly be accomplished.
It was accomplished. A shadow fell upon the earth at noon-day. The
waters grew dark as midnight. Every thing alive was quiet with fear—
the trees, the birds, the cattle, the very hearts of men who were
gathered together in the houses of the Lord, every where, throughout
all the land, for worship and for mutual succor. It was indeed a “Dark
Day”—a day never to be thought of by those who were alive at the
time, nor by their children’s children, without fear. The shadow of the
grave was abroad, with a voice like the voice of the grave.
Earthquake, fire, and a furious bright storm followed; inundation, war
and strife in the church. Stars fell in a shower, heavy cannon were
heard in the deep of the wilderness, low music from the sea—
trumpets, horses, armies, mustering for battle in the deep sea.
Apparitions were met in the high way, people whom nobody knew,
men of a most unearthly stature; evil spirits going abroad on the
sabbath day. The print of huge feet and hoof-marks were continually
discovered in the snow, in the white sand of the sea-shore—nay, in
the solid rocks and along the steep side of high mountains, where no
mortal hoof could go; and sometimes they could be traced from roof
to roof on the house-tops, though the buildings were very far apart;
and the shape of Elizabeth Hutchinson herself, was said to have
appeared to a traveller, on the very spot where she and her large
family, after being driven forth out of New-England by the power of
the new church, were put to death by the savages. He that saw the
shape knew it, and was afraid for the people; for the look of the
woman was a look of wrath, and her speech a speech of power.
Elizabeth Hutchinson was one of the most extraordinary women of
the age—haughty, ambitious and crafty; and when it was told every
where through the Plymouth colony that she had appeared to one of
the church that expelled her, they knew that she had come back, to
be seen of the judges and elders, according to her oath, and were
siezed with a deep fear. They knew that she had been able to draw
away from their peculiar mode of worship, a tithe of their whole
number when she was alive, and a setter forth, if not of strange
gods, at least of strange doctrines: and who should say that her
mischievous power had not been fearfully augmented by death?
Meanwhile the men of New Plymouth, and of Massachusetts Bay,
had multiplied so that all the neighborhood was tributary to them,
and they were able to send forth large bodies of their young men to
war, six hundred, seven hundred, and a thousand at a time, year
after year, to fight with Philip of Mount Hope, a royal barbarian, who
had wit enough to make war as the great men of Europe would make
war now, and to persuade the white people that the prophecy of the
Quakers related to him. It is true enough that he made war like a
savage—and who would not, if he were surrounded as Philip of
Mount Hope was, by a foe whose hatred was a part of his religion, a
part of his very blood and being? if his territory were ploughed up or
laid waste by a superior foe? if the very wilderness about him were
fired while it was the burial-place and sanctuary of his mighty
fathers? if their form of worship were scouted, and every grave and
every secret place of prayer laid open to the light, with all their
treasures and all their mysteries? every temple not made with hands,
every church built by the Builder of the Skies, invaded by such a foe
and polluted with the rites of a new faith, or levelled without mercy—
every church and every temple, whether of rock or wood, whether
perpetual from the first, or planted as the churches and temples of
the solitude are, with leave to perpetuate themselves forever, to
renew their strength and beauty every year and to multiply
themselves on every side forever and ever, in spite of deluge and
fire, storm, strife and earthquake; every church and every temple
whether roofed as the skies are, and floored as the mountains are,
with great clouds and with huge rocks, or covered in with tree-
branches and paved with fresh turf, lighted with stars and purified
with high winds? Would not the man of Europe make war now like a
savage, and without mercy, if he were beset by a foe—for such was
the foe that Philip of Mount Hope had to contend with in the fierce
pale men of Massachusetts Bay,—a foe that no weapon of his could
reach, a foe coming up out of the sea with irresistible power, and
with a new shape? What if armies were to spring up out of the solid
earth before the man of Europe—it would not be more wonderful to
him than it was to the man of America to see armies issuing from the
deep. What if they were to approach in balloons—or in great ships of
the air, armed all over as the foe of the poor savage appeared to be,
when the ships of the water drew near, charged with thunder and
with lightning, and with four-footed creatures, and with sudden
death? Would the man of Europe make war in such a case
according to what are now called the usages of war?
The struggle with this haughty savage was regarded for a time as
the wo without a shape, to which the prophecy referred, the sorrow
without a name; for it occupied the whole force of the country, long
and long after the bow of the red-chief was broken forever, his
people scattered from the face of the earth, and his royalty reduced
to a shadow—a shadow it is true, but still the shadow of a king; for
up to the last hour of his life, when he died as no king had ever the
courage to die, he showed no sign of terror, betrayed no wish to
conciliate the foe, and smote all that were near without mercy,
whenever they talked of submission; though he had no hope left, no
path for escape, and every shot of the enemy was fatal to some one
of the few that stood near him. It was a war, which but for the
accidental discovery of a league embracing all the chief tribes of the
north, before they were able to muster their strength for the
meditated blow, would have swept away the white men, literally to
the four winds of heaven, and left that earth free which they had set
up their dominion over by falsehood and by treachery. By and by
however, just when the issue of that war was near, and the fright of
the pale men over, just when the hearts of the church had begun to
heave with a new hope, and the prophecy of wrath and sorrow was
no longer to be heard in the market-place, and by the way-side, or
wherever the people were gathered together for business or worship,
with a look of awe and a subdued breath—just when it came to be
no longer thought of nor cared for by the judges and the elders, to
whom week after week and year after year, it had been a familiar
proverb of death (if bad news from the war had come over night, or
news of trouble to the church, at home or abroad, in Europe or in
America) they saw it suddenly and wholly accomplished before their
faces—every word of it and every letter.
The shadow of the destroyer went by ... the type was no more. But
lo! in the stead thereof, while every mother was happy, and every
father in peace, and every child asleep in security, because the
shadow and the type had gone by—lo! the Destroyer himself
appeared! The shadow of death gave way for the visage of death—
filling every heart with terror, and every house with lamentation. The
people cried out for fear, as with one voice. They prayed as with one
prayer. They had no hope; for they saw the children of those who
had offered outrage to the poor quaker-woman gathered up, on
every side, from the rest of the people, and after a few days and a
brief inquiry, afflicted in their turn with reproach and outcry, with
misery, torture and cruel death;—and when they saw this, they
thought of the speech of Elizabeth Hutchinson before the priesthood
of the land, the judges and the people, when they drove her out from
among them, because of her new faith, and left her to perish for it in
the depth of a howling wilderness; her, and her babes, and her
beautiful daughter, and her two or three brave disciples, away from
hope and afar from succor;—and as they thought of this, they were
filled anew with unspeakable dread: for Mary Dyer and Elizabeth
Hutchinson, were they not familiar, and very dear friends? were they
not sisters in life, and sisters in death? gifted alike with a spirit of
sure prophecy, though of a different faith? and martyrs alike to the
church?
CHAPTER III.
“A strange infatuation had already begun to produce misery in
private families, and disorder throughout the community,” says an old
American writer, in allusion to the period of our story, 1691-2. “The
imputation of witchcraft was accompanied with a prevalent belief of
its reality; and the lives of a considerable number of innocent people
were sacrificed to blind zeal and superstitious credulity. The mischief
began at Naumkeag, (Salem) but it soon extended into various parts
of the colony. The contagion however, was principally within the
county of Essex. The æra of English learning, had scarcely
commenced. Laws then existed in England against witches; and the
authority of Sir Matthew Hale, who was revered in New England, not
only for his knowledge in the law, but for his gravity and piety, had
doubtless, great influence. The trial of the witches in Suffolk, in
England, was published in 1684; and there was so exact a
resemblance between the Old England dæmons and the New, that, it
can hardly be doubted the arts of the designing were borrowed, and
the credulity of the populace augmented from the parent country. * *
***
“The gloomy state of New England probably facilitated the delusion,
for ‘superstition flourishes in times of danger and dismay.’ The
distress of the colonist, at this time, was great. The sea-coast was
infested with privateers. The inland frontiers, east and west, were
continually harassed by the French and Indians. The abortive
expedition to Canada, had exposed the country to the resentment of
France, the effects of which were perpetually dreaded. The old
charter was gone, and what evils would be introduced by the new,
which was very reluctantly received by many, time only could
determine, but fear might forbode. * * How far these causes
operating in a wilderness that was scarcely cleared up, might have
contributed toward the infatuation, it is difficult to determine. It were
injurious however, to consider New England as peculiar in this
culpable credulity, with its sanguinary effects; for more persons have
been put to death for witchcraft, in a single county in England, in a
short space of time, than have suffered for the same cause, in all
New-England, since its first settlement.”
Another American writer who was an eye witness of the facts which
are embodied in the following narrative, says, “As to the method
which the Salem justices do take in their examinations, it is truly this:
A warrant being issued out to apprehend the persons that are
charged and complained of by the afflicted children, (Abigail Paris
and Bridget Pope) said persons are brought before the justices, the
afflicted being present. The justices ask the apprehended why they
afflict these poor children; to which the apprehended answer they do
not afflict them. The justices order the apprehended to look upon the
said children, which accordingly they do; and at the time of that look
(I dare not say by that look as, the Salem gentlemen do) the afflicted
are cast into a fit. The apprehended are then blinded and ordered to
touch the afflicted; and at that touch, though not by the touch (as
above) the afflicted do ordinarily come out of their fits. The afflicted
persons then declare and affirm that the apprehended have afflicted
them; upon which the apprehended persons though of never so
good repute are forthwith committed to prison on suspicion of
witchcraft.”
At this period, the chief magistrate of the New-Plymouth colony, a
shrewd, artful, uneducated man, was not only at the head of those
who believed in witchcraft as a familiar thing, but he was a head-
ruler in the church. He was a native New-Englander of low birth—so
say the records of our country,—where birth is now, and ever will be
a matter of inquiry and solicitude, of shame perhaps to the few and
of pride to the few, but of inquiry with all, in spite of our ostentatious
republicanism. He was the head man over a body of men who may
be regarded as the natural growth of a rugged soil in a time of
religious warfare; with hearts and with heads like the resolute
unforgiving Swiss-protestant of their age, or the Scotch-covenanter
of an age that has hardly yet gone by. They were the Maccabees of
the seventeenth century, and he was their political chief. They were
the fathers of a new church in a new world, where no church had
ever been heard of before; and he was ready to buckle a sword upon
his thigh and go out against all the earth, at the command of that

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The Palgrave Handbook Of

Anti-Communist Persecutions 1st

The Palgrave Encyclopedia Of Imperialism And Anti-

The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism 1st Edition Carl

The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity 1st Edition Steven

From Anti Judaism to Anti Semitism Ancient and Medieval

The Palgrave handbook of critical theory Thompson

The Palgrave Handbook of International Development 1st

The Palgrave Handbook of European Banking 1st Edition

The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education 1st

ISBN 978-3-030-54962-6 ISBN 978-3-030-54963-3 (eBook)

Cover credit: National Geographic Image Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

This book is a collective effort to make anti-communist persecutions and their

Introduction: Anti-Communist Persecutions in the Twentieth

Part I Policies and Practices of Persecution

The Smith Act Trials and Systemic Violence: Anti-Communist

The Continuities and Discontinuities of Anti-Leftist State

Franco’s Anti-Communist Judicial System: Results

Laboratories of the Conditio Humana: The Role

Maoist Insurgency and the State’s Counterinsurgency in India:

Getting Hold of a Universe of Conspirators: Anti-Communist

Part II Anti-Communism in the Context of Nation-Building,

How Anti-Communism Disrupted Decolonization: South

Redefining the Outsider: Anti-Communist Narratives

The Black and Red Scare in the Twentieth-Century United

Christian Agency in Anti-Communist Persecution?

Part III Anti-Communist Persecution and New Models of

Killing Communists: Stalinist Repression and the “Great

Nation-Building as Anti-Communist Violence: The Armed

Part IV The Role of Non-State Actors

Non-state Anti-Communism and Political Violence

The Religious Justification of Anti-Communist Persecutions

From World War One to the Vanguard of Nazism? A Statistical

The Persecution of Communists in Mao’s China 363

A Short History of Anti-Communist Violence in Colombia

Part V Responses of the Persecuted

“So That They Leave the Prison Cage as Conscious

Women, Communism, and Repression in Interwar Poland:

Indonesian Narratives of Survival in and after 1965 and Their

Remembering Anti-Communist Violence in Rural Society

The Left in Turkey: Emergence, Persecutions and Left-Wing

Part VI Concluding Remarks

Anti-Communist Persecutions Between Globe-Spanning

Ernesto Bohoslavsky Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Los

Janis Nalbadidacis Department of History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,

Remembering Anti-Communist Violence in Rural Society in

Introduction: Anti-Communist Persecutions in the Twentieth

The Continuities and Discontinuities of Anti-Leftist State

From World War One to the Vanguard of Nazism? A Statistical

In his science-fiction novel The Iron Heel of 1908, which he framed as an

© The Author(s) 2020 1

famines; and armed uprisings, international revolutions, and wars between

Table 1 List of major

5 StéphaneCourtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

The State of Research

governments’ policies, secret services, and covert actions.10 This literature

Genève était le centre du mouvement anticommuniste international (Geneva: Éditions

16 “The Story of the Communist Party”, July 1961, https://www.google.com/url?sa=

several Latin American regimes and the US-American government to repress