In medicine, enemas and laxatives are used to facilitate the evacuation of waste substances from the body. This action is a purge and with it you can clean your own body. The therapeutic use of the word purge has been extended to the context of politics and in this sense we speak of a political purge to explain the physical elimination or dismissal of those political leaders who are accused of being traitors to the country and to the interests of the nation. .
The person who promotes a political purge process is normally a dictator, who launches a systematic campaign to eliminate any internal opposition that puts his absolute power at risk.
Stalinist purges
For a totalitarian leader to eliminate his enemies is a common practice and part of the logic of all dictatorships. However, the political purge has a singularity: it is not about eliminating or imprisoning the enemies, but rather the members of the party in power. This phenomenon occurred in a very striking way in the period in which Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, as well as in other communist regimes.
The Stalinist purges were especially intense between 1936 and 1940. During this period, a systematic persecution against senior political leaders was launched. Most of the persecuted were tortured and killed or ended up in the gulags, concentration camps scattered throughout the territory. The victims of this “cleansing” process received all kinds of accusations, most of them false or unfounded (they were accused of being spies at the service of foreign powers, enemies of the people, or counterrevolutionaries).
The purges in China and Cambodia
In the so-called Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Mao unleashed a political purge against all kinds of “enemies”: intellectuals, political leaders, members of the army, small farmers, etc.
Mao’s strategy to consolidate his power and eliminate any opposition element was based on the use of the Red Guards who were touring the country and eliminating all the supposed enemies. As in Stalin’s Soviet Union, it was necessary to use a credible excuse and in this case the argument that served as an alibi was to eliminate any capitalist indication or contrary to the true revolution.
Following in the footsteps of Stalin and Mao, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia also launched a political purge when they ruled the country between 1975 and 1979. In this case, it was not about assassinations of political leaders or the imprisonment of intellectuals, but about an extermination of a large part of the population with the aim of creating a new society based on the ideals of communism.
Photo: Fotolia – Sirikornt / Mopic
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