Persecution Is Multi-Faceted

Persecution comes in many forms: persecution for religious beliefs, persecution by the police state, for those who do not follow the party line, persecution for ideology, persecution for personal beliefs in regard to one’s body, and persecution based on racial identification.

The mainstream propaganda machine organizes persecution into four broad categories, religious, ethnic, political, and social.

Examples of persecution include:

-          Persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime (the social democrats)

-          Covid-19 gave governments the excuse for religious persecution (relief discrimination, forced conversions, and justification for more surveillance

-          Christians are treated poorly by the Islamic State

-          Persecution of political dissidents

-          Persecuting racial groups and other minorities

-          Physical and mental violence

-          Persecution through denial of judicial redress, basic human rights, and humanitarian aid.

-          Armenians were persecuted and killed in Turkey, resulting in an Armenian genocide that is yet to be addressed properly by Turkey.

-          Communists and the Nazis persecuted gypsies and homosexuals across Europe, throwing them in concentration camps and prisons.

-          Stalin persecuted Ukrainian farmers which he called “kulaks” (wealthy peasants in Russia). He caused the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-1933, entirely man-made, which resulted in the killing of almost four million Ukrainians who resisted his collectivization. There was no basis for famine in 1932-1933, there were plenty of crop yields to sustain life, but Stalin sent the Soviets to requisition huge quotas of crops which left the Ukrainian peasants starving.

-          Christians in Africa were persecuted by the Muslims and many were killed.

Persecution can be expressed as outright confiscation of property through eminent domain, confiscation by brute force in communist regimes, destruction of property such as burning, followed by confiscation, exclusion from society by marginalization and pariah status, arrests, incitement of hatred and violence against a specific group or person, prison, beatings, torture, murder, and execution.

Religious persecution is widespread. Not even the formerly constitutionally protected United States is free of religious persecution and examples are many. Most recently, churches in North America were not allowed to meet during the policed Covid lockdowns and priests and parishioners were jailed and fined for attending church.

As United States accelerates its advance to global communism, religious persecution will spread fast just as it did during the former socialist republics, Soviet satellites where the Communist Party ruled, pressing their heavily armed boots on the neck of the hapless and unarmed citizens.

Religion will suffer a similar fate as it did in former or current communist states.  Religious communities of the Christian faith will dwindle, seminaries will be restricted in the number of attendants, church building permits will be reduced, churches will be demolished, burned, or sold as mosques, and pastors may not be given the state license to preach. Churches will be controlled by the government and the lives of families of the Judeo-Christian faith and of their children will be made difficult and avenues for advancement will shrink or be closed for them.

One glaring example of persecution of the faithful happened in 1972 and 1981. Twenty thousand Bibles were promised to the Reformed Church (ethnic Hungarians located in Transylvania). Two shipments were sent in 1972 and 1981 as promised. According to former Ambassador to Romania, David B. Funderburk, … “fewer than two hundred out of the promised twenty thousand were actually delivered to the churches. Instead, pieces of the Bibles appeared in toilet paper made at a factory in Braila. The Rev. Dr. Alexander Havadtoy of Yale University has meticulously documented this blasphemy. Interspersed throughout strips of toilet paper which made their way to the West were letters and words from the Bibles of the type sent to Romania.” The toilet paper samples were presented at press conferences in the U.S. (Pinstripes and Reds, David B. Funderburk, Edwards & Broughton Company, 1987, p. 85)

Such human desecration did not diminish God and Bibles were eventually replaced after the “fall” of communism, following the December Revolution in Romania and the destruction of the infamous Berlin Wall built by East Germany, the socialist republic under the wing of the Soviets. Funny how nobody rushed to defect to the oppressive communist East but plenty have succeeded or have died trying to flee to the freedom of the capitalist West.

But has communism truly fell? Did it not go underground, regrouped, and re-emerged more powerful than ever around the world from Switzerland, of all places, the country that does not confer citizenship easily or generously to anybody, yet they are influencing the flood of illegal immigration and communism around the world.

Whatever Christian religion the communist police state allowed to exist in the socialist republics ruled by the iron fist of the Communist Party, that religion and those priests had to be active agents of the police state and to control the faithful with lies and platitudes such as, “if you listen to the father and the mother of this country [the dictator and his wife], then nothing bad would happen to you.” Translation, be quiet, endure the poverty, the misery, and you will live. You will receive your daily indenture to communism via long lines at the grocery stores, bread stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.

Dissident priests were often persecuted, disappeared, tortured, and killed. The West ignored the deaths or made cursory mention of such tragic events.

The Jews in Romania had a unique situation when compared to the other socialist countries ruled by the Communist Party. Ceausescu had made a deal with Israel to allow Jews to emigrate in exchange for payments per head. Israel even had an embassy in Bucharest. According to Funderburk, “Before WWII, there were nearly one million Jews in Greater Romania, but by the end of the war and due to territorial losses, the number was cut in half. By 1987, 25,000 Jews were left and were mostly elderly but much better off economically due to assistance from groups in Israel and the U.S.

As part of the U.S.-Romanian Trade Agreement of 1975, 2,500-3,000 Romanians a year were allowed to emigrate. The rest, who were denied visas, were persecuted by the communist police state.

Political persecutions around the world and across the centuries were too many to mention. The most recent in history is the constant six-year long persecution of President Donald J. Trump by his rivals in the Democrat Party, in the mainstream media, and in the Republican establishment.

Philosophers, artists, actors, revolutionaries, scientists, heads of states, military leaders, writers, priests, and activists have been persecuted by their opposition or by a police state, or a tyrant drunk on power. If we allow such persecutions to persist, unchecked, the state will force us to live in a world not unlike Orwell's 1984.