Word: communist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cold February night in 1951, South Korean troops moved swiftly to take a communist guerrilla stronghold on Bulgap Mountain, at a county called Hampyeong in the Korean peninsula's southwest corner. By the time they scaled the ridge, the rebels had fled. That's when the bloodshed began. Suspecting the villagers in the area had helped the enemy, the soldiers made them kneel in a trench, then shoved sharpened bamboo sticks down their throats and shot them...
...From 1950 to 1953, communist forces from North Korea and the military-run South fought one of the bloodiest civil wars of the 20th century, leaving more than 2 million civilians dead. Troops from both sides carried out mass executions. But after the Korean War ended, a succession of military dictators through the 1980s in the South suppressed the accounts; those who suggested South Korean forces might have executed innocents - and even family members who exhumed their relatives for proper burials - were harassed or arrested for being communist sympathizers...
...decades, historians have relied on written and oral accounts to pinpoint the killings, but it wasn't until the commission began gathering forensic evidence in 2005 that the scope of each massacre became clearer. The South Korean military, for example, claimed in reports that more than 1,000 "communist guerrillas" were killed at Bulgap Mountain that night in February. But the excavation tells a different story. Investigators found 133 intact skeletons bending their knees and clutching their fingers behind their skulls - 21 were under 16 years old and nonmilitary artifacts like toys and hairpins were found, indicating the people were...
...Worse still, this isn't the first time Sarkozy has been accused of trying to claim a leftist hero as a representative of his own values. Two years ago, for example, he started an annual ritual that involves schoolchildren reading a patriotic letter written by French communist resistance fighter Guy Môquet before he was executed by the Nazis in 1941. During his 2007 presidential campaign, he also repeatedly quoted the seminal French socialist leader (and Panthéon resident) Jean Jaurès in an attempt to infer that the legendary leftist would have backed the positions...
...However, despite Camus' early years as a communist and long dedication to fighting imperialism, his later rejection of totalitarianism of all kinds - and denunciation of Soviet oppression that ran him afoul of contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre - don't exactly make him a perfect icon of the left, says Cusset. "Though he was courageous in refusing to be shut away into any political or philosophical category, Camus never really said what camp he belonged to, meaning his legacy is open to lots of interpretation," Cusset says. "Camus was indeed one of the most famous figures and beloved writers...