page_title: Anti-communism
section_title: South Korea
hierarchical_section_title: Anti-communism / Anti-communism in different countries and regions / South Korea
caption_attribution_description: English: In this July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified "top secret," prisoners lie on the ground before their execution by South Korean troops in Taejon (now known as Daejeon), South Korea. Shutting down its inquiry into South Korea's hidden history, a government commission investigating a century of human rights abuses will leave unexplored scores of suspected mass graves believed to hold remains of tens of thousands of South Korean political detainees summarily executed by their government early in the Korean War, sometimes as U.S. officers watched. In a political about-face, the commission, which also investigated the U.S. military's large-scale killing of Korean War refugees, has ruled the Americans in case after case acted out of military necessity. 1,800 South Korean political prisoners were executed by the South Korean military at Taejon, South Korea, over three days in July 1950.[1] National Archives, Major Abbott/U.S. Army - copy via AP Photo
context_page_description: Anti-communism is a political movement and ideology opposed to communism. It has been prominent in resistance movements against communism under socialist states governed by communist parties throughout history. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry. Anti-communism has been an element of movements which hold many different political positions, including conservatism, fascism, liberalism, nationalism and social democracy as well as anarchist or libertarian and even socialist and anti-Stalinist left viewpoints.
  The first organization which was specifically dedicated to opposing communism was the Russian White movement which fought in the Russian Civil War starting in 1918 against the recently established Bolshevik government. The White movement was militarily supported by several allied foreign governments which represented the first instance of anti-communism as a government policy. Nevertheless, the Red Army defeated the White movement and the Soviet Union was created in 1922.
context_section_description: Choi ji-ryong is an outspoken anti-communist cartoonist in South Korea. His editorial cartoons have been critical of Korean presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo Hyun.
caption: Bodo League massacre of communists and suspected sympathizers, South Korea, 1950
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