Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

ex-military officers, the Auxiliary Division of the RIC—known colloquially as the
“Auxies”—launched an intensive campaign of brutal counterinsurgency throughout Ireland.
This took the form of besieging and burning villages and small towns, shooting civilians
suspected of having links with the IRA, abduction, murder, and other random acts of
violence and human rights abuse. On the night of December 11, 1920, large numbers of
Black and Tans attacked the major city of Cork, in southern Ireland, sacked it, and put it
to the torch. The central city area sustained significant damage from this action. Many
additional atrocities were committed by the Auxiliaries and the RIC and were blamed on
the Black and Tans, but this is not to exonerate the Tans themselves; they were as brutal
an occupation force as any seen in other places during the twentieth century, and they
carried out their reign of terror with the assent of the British authorities. Quite legitimately,
the Black and Tans could be fitted into a category of state-sponsored terror. During
their term in Ireland, this violent force was responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths,
for large-scale destruction throughout many parts of Ireland, and for the deprivation of
civil rights and normal justice mechanisms guaranteed to all British subjects. The existence
and activities of this unit, raised and endorsed by a thoroughly democratic government
such as that of Britain, is testament to the fragility of civil society in a time of stress
and shows that no society is immune to harsh and draconian methods of repression when
such methods are considered or deemed necessary.
Black Deeds of the Kremlin, The. Title of a two-volume work edited by S. O. Pidhainy
(1907–1965), published between 1953 (Volume 1) and 1955 (Volume 2) by the Democratic
Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime. The second
volume is devoted exclusively to the Soviet man-made Ukrainian terror-famine of
1932–1933 and contains hundreds of eyewitness accounts of conditions prevailing at that
time. In many cases, those providing their testimonies used their initials rather than their
full names for fear of reprisal that might take place against family members then still
living under Soviet occupation. Some of those relating their accounts had been able to
travel outside of Ukraine itself in their regular duties as technicians, skilled workers, and
the like; their stories show no evidence of famine in Russia or other Soviet republics save
nearby Byelorussia (now Belarus). During the Cold War, supporters of the Soviet Union
routinely denounced The Black Deeds of the Kremlin as a capitalist-inspired forgery that
had no basis in fact; their cause has been taken up more recently by genocide deniers (particularly
on the Internet) who consider the publication to be nothing other than anticommunist
propaganda. Others, by contrast, have looked to The Black Deeds in order to
confirm their opposition toward communism, Jews, and the Soviet Union.
Black Legend. A frequently raised issue in discussions of the Roman Catholic Church
and its past regarding apostates and heretics concerns the institution known as the Holy
Office, commonly called the Inquisition. This had been established in the thirteenth century
as a special ecclesiastical court to investigate heresy and to try heretics. Its membership
comprised monks appointed by the pope or by local bishops, and it conducted its proceedings
in secret—using torture to obtain “confessions” both from those who had been
accused and, often, from those called as witnesses. Heretics adjudged guilty were sentenced
to fasting and prayer; sometimes fines or imprisonment was added to this. The
Church drew the line at executions, however, preferring instead to hand convicted
heretics over to the “the secular arm,” that is, to the civilian authorities. The civilian
authorities, in turn, were expected to punish heretics by burning them at the stake. On
BLACK LEGEND
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