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Korean War

Freedom is not free is the inscription on the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Korean War started June 25, 1950. Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, killing thousands. Outnumbered South Korean and American troops, as part of a U.N. police action, fought courageously against the Communist Chinese and North Korean troops, who were supplied with arms and MIG fighters from the Soviet Union.

Five-star General Douglas MacArthur was Supreme U.N. Commander, leading the United Nations Command from 1950 to 1951. MacArthur made a daring landing of troops at Inchon, deep behind North Korean lines, and recaptured the city of Seoul.

With temperatures sometimes forty degrees below zero, and Washington politicians limiting the use of air power against the Communists, there were nearly 140,000 American casualties:

Harry S. Truman compared Communism and Democracy in his inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1949: We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God. From this faith we will not be moved. Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice. Communism subjects the individual to arrest without lawful cause, punishment without trial, and forced labor as a chattel of the state. It decrees what information he shall receive, what art he shall produce, what leaders he shall follow, and what thoughts he shall think. Democracy maintains that government is established for the benefit of the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom.

Truman continued: These differences between Communism and Democracy do not concern the United States alone. People everywhere are coming to realize that what is involved is material well-being, human dignity, and the right to believe in and worship God.

The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx in 1848. Marx had attended the University of Berlin, where he became involved with a radical anti-religious group, the Young Hegelians. After being refused a university post because of his extreme views, Karl Marx began publishing a paper in 1842, which was banned in Germany.

He fled to Paris, then Brussels, and finally to London. Marx founded the International Workingmens Association and the Social Democrat Labor Party. Marxs philosophy influenced Adolph Hitler in starting the Nazi Party, and Vladimir Lenin, in starting the Communist Party.

Karl Marx stated:

Franklin D. Roosevelt explained in his address to the Delegates of the American Youth Congress, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1940, that communism is effectively dictatorship: I disliked the regimentation under Communism. I abhorred the indiscriminate killings of thousands of innocent victims. I heartily deprecated the banishment of religion. I, with many of you, hoped that Russia would work out its own problems, and that its government would eventually become a peace-loving, popular government. That hope is today shattered. The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.

Winston S. Churchill gave an address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946, in which he introduced the phrase Iron Curtain to describe the Cold War between Western powers and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Churchill stated: The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. To fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention.

Roger Baldwin was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a 501(c)3 tax-exempt Foundation. In 1935, Roger Baldwin wrote in the Harvard reunion book on the 30th reunion of his class of 1905: I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.

Roger Baldwin twice visited the Soviet Union, embraced Vietnamese Communist dictator Ho Chi Minh, and wrote a book, Liberty Under the Soviets (1927), in which he stated: I joined. I dont regret being a part of the Communist tactic, which increased the effectiveness of a good cause. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal. I wanted what the Communists wanted.

In 1948, the California Senate Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities stated in its report, page 107: The ACLU may be definitely classified as a Communist front or transmission belt organization. At least 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of Communists who come in conflict with the law.

Dwight Eisenhower was quoted in Time magazine, Oct. 13, 1952: The Bill of Rights contains no grant of privilege for a group of people to destroy the Bill of Rights. A group like the Communist conspiracy dedicated to the ultimate destruction of all civil liberties, cannot be allowed to claim civil liberties as its privileged sanctuary from which to carry on subversion of the Government.

In 1950, members of the Communist Party USA formed the Mattachine Society, the nations first homosexual rights organizations, which lobbied to repeal sodomy laws.

Dwight Eisenhower stated Feb. 25, 1953: Almost 100 percent of Americans would like to stamp out all traces of Communism in our country. I went to Columbia University as its president and I insisted on one thing. If we had a known Communist in our faculty and he could not be discharged I was automatically discharged. I personally would not be a party to an organization where there was a known card-carrying Communist in such a responsible position as teaching our young.

President Harry S. Truman spoke at the laying of the cornerstone of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., April 3, 1951: Without a firm moral foundation, freedom degenerates quickly into selfishness and license. Unless men exercise their freedom in a just and honest way, within moral restraints, a free society can degenerate into anarchy. Then there will be freedom only for the rapacious and those who are stronger and more unscrupulous than the rank and file of the people. The international Communist movement is based on a fierce and terrible fanaticism. It denies the existence of God and, wherever it can, it stamps out the worship of God. Our religious faith gives us the answer to the false beliefs of Communism. Our faith shows us the way to create a society where man can find his greatest happiness under God. Surely, we can follow that faith with the same devotion and determination the Communists give to their godless creed.

Every day our newspapers tell us about the fighting in Korea. Our men there are making heroic sacrifices. They are fighting and suffering in an effort to prevent the tide of aggression from sweeping across the world. Our young men are offering their lives for us in the hills of Korea and yet too many of us are chiefly concerned over whether or not we can buy a television set next week. This is a failure to understand the moral principles upon which our Nation is founded.

In Lessons of History (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1968), Will and Ariel Durant wrote: The greatest question of our time is not Communism versus individualism, not even East versus West; it is whether man can live without God.

Conrad Hilton, founder of the hotel chain, stated in a prayer breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel, following addresses by Congressmen, Senators, and Vice President Nixon: It took a war to put prayer at the center of the lives of our fighting men. It took a war, and the frightening evil of Communism, to show the world that this whole business of prayer is not a sissy, a counterfeit thing that man can do or not as he wishes. Prayer is a part of mans personality, without which he limps. Men grope in darkness unless they believe that God, in His kindness, is willing to lift the shadows if we ask Him in prayer.

Truman stated while lighting the National Christmas Tree, Dec. 24, 1952: Shepherds, in a field, heard angels singing: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. We turn to the old, old story of how God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. '

Truman continued: Tonight, our hearts turn first of all to our brave men and women in Korea. They are fighting and suffering and even dying that we may preserve the chance of peace in the world. And as we go about our business of trying to achieve peace in the world, let us remember always to try to act and live in the spirit of the Prince of Peace. He bore in His heart no hate and no malice nothing but love for all mankind. We should try as nearly as we can to follow His example. We believe that all men are truly the children of God. As we pray for our loved ones far from home as we pray for our men and women in Korea, and all our service men and women wherever they are let us also pray for our enemies. Let us pray that the spirit of God shall enter their lives and prevail in their lands.

Truman concluded: Through Jesus Christ the world will yet be a better and fairer place.

General Douglas MacArthur warned in a speech to the Salvation Army, Dec. 12, 1951, stating: History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.

Dwight Eisenhower was quoted in the Religious Herald, Virginia, Jan. 25, 1952: What is our battle against Communism if it is not a fight between anti-God and a belief in the Almighty? Communists have to eliminate God from their system. When God comes, Communism has to go.

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At the College of William and Mary, May 15, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower stated: It is necessary that we earnestly seek out and uproot any traces of Communism.

First Lady Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower stated in a conversation at the Doud home regarding their son John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower, who was serving in Korea: He has a mission to fulfill and God will see to it that nothing will happen to him till he fulfills it.

Eisenhower addressed Congress, Feb. 2, 1953: The calculated pressures of aggressive Communism have forced us to live in a world of turmoil. No single country, even one so powerful as ours, can alone defend the liberty of all nations threatened by Communist aggression from without and subversion within. I must make special mention of the war in Korea. This war is, for Americans, the most painful phase of Communist aggression throughout the world.

Fighting in Korea was halted July 27, 1953, with the signing of an armistice at Panmunjom.

On Dec. 24, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower stated at the lighting of the national Christmas tree: The world still stands divided in two antagonistic parts. Prayer places freedom and communism in opposition one to the other. The Communist can find no reserve of strength in prayer because his doctrine of materialism and statism denies the dignity of man and consequently the existence of God. But in America religious faith is the foundation of free government, so is prayer an indispensable part of that faith. The founders of this, our country, came first to these shores in search of freedom to live beyond the yoke of tyranny.

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Let's compare Communism and Democracy, shall we? - WND.com

In the summer of 1944, the Nazi occupation of Poland was nearing the end of its fifth year. More than one in five Poles had been killed, enslaved, or shipped off to concentration camps. The country was being incrementally destroyed to make way for Adolf Hitlers vision of a greater German Reich. Still, hundreds of thousands of Poles continued to fight.

By August, the Soviet Red Army had managed to drive German forces off of Russian territory and take parts of Poland. Vast amounts of American and British aid, including trucks, food, and raw materials, enabled the Soviets to deploy and supply vast numbers of tanks, planes, and guns.

With an Allied victory no longer in doubt, Polands Armia Krajowa (Home Army) saw what it considered its best chance for success: an uprising in the Polish capital of Warsaw, timed to coincide with the arrival of the oncoming Soviet offensive.

Just days before, on July 25, Radio Moscow had called for every Polish homestead to become a stronghold in the struggle against the invaders. On July 29, Soviet tanks reached the outskirts of Warsaw and began engaging the German armoreddivisions there.

Starting on Aug. 1, tens of thousands of Home Army members, armed with captured German weaponry and supplies provided by the Western airlifts, seized control over Warsaw and attempted to establish radio contact with the Soviets.

Soldiers of the Polish Home Army ride a captured German Panther tank on Aug. 2 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising. (Juliusz Bogdan Deczkowski/Public Domain)

But no help was forthcoming. For reasons that to this day remain classified by the Kremlin, the Soviet offensive stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw. A nearby Soviet airbase remained unused, while Western airdrops were limited to faraway locations in Italy.

Without heavy weapons or outside support, the Polish resistance stood no chance against even the weakened German occupation force. Warsaw was razed and up to 200,000 civilians died, the majority of them executed by the Nazis after the battle.

Soviet forces only restarted their offensive in January 1945, and the war ended that May.

For the major Alliednationsthe United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Union among themWorld War II was a clear victory. Six years of aggressive conquest and mass murder by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were put to an end, and the Axis powers unconditionally surrendered.

But for Poland and other nations in Eastern Europe, the end of Nazi occupation and genocide broughttotalitarian Soviet rule. The democratic Western allies had gone to war in 1939 because Germany had invaded Poland, yet at the wars end, they were unwilling to intervene when the Soviets established a puppet regime there.

Western officials and media often failed to criticize their Soviet ally or consider dictator Josef Stalins goals rationally. The vast provision of aid to the Red Army, for instance, might well have been the boost needed for the Soviet regime to subjugate Eastern Europe in the postwar period.

We might have wasted less money and material than we did, said U.S. diplomat George Kennan in a 1951 letter. We might have arrived in the centre of Europe slightly sooner and less encumbered with obligations to our Soviet ally. The postwar line of division between East and West might have lain somewhat farther east than it is today, and that would certainly be a relief to everyone concerned.

A U.S.-produced 2-ton Studebaker truck, here pictured in Soviet service in Berlin in May 1945. Thousands of vehicles sent to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program aided Stalin in his conquest of Eastern Europe. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 204-018 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The Soviet communist regime and its Polish communist allies certainly benefited from the destruction of the organized resistance loyal to the prewar Polish government. Soviet propaganda downplayed the achievements of the Home Army and labeled them as reactionaries.

George Orwell, the disillusioned British communist who authored Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, expressed his disgust with the general inclination among journalists to sympathize with the Soviet attitude on the Warsaw Uprising.

One was left with the general impression that the Poles deserved to have their bottoms smacked for doing what all the Allied wirelesses had been urging them to do for years past, Orwell wrote in September 1944.

Dont imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency.

Meanwhile, participation in World War II on the side of the Allies seemed to absolve Stalin of his treacherous prewar actionsthe Soviet Union had originally been an ally of Germany, and in fact had aided Hitler in the 1939 invasion of Poland that began the war in the first place. Only in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, did the communist superpower switch sides.

Unsurprisingly, Moscow resumed the oppressive and murderous policies toward its Polish satellite state that the communist leadership had indulged in from 1939 to 1941.

Tens of thousands of patriotic Polish soldiers and officers, especially those who had lived in Great Britain, hastened to rebuild their country. Rather than giving these men a heros welcome, the communist government subjected them to persecution, including show trials, torture, and execution.

Warsaw, now the capital of the communist Polish Peoples Republic, also became the namesake of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-controlled military alliance that, throughout the Cold War, placed the resources and territory of Eastern Europe at Moscows disposal.

The real history and memory of the Polish resistance in World War IIthat Poland was one of the few occupied nations to produce no major traitors or collaborators; that Polish operatives secured valuable intelligence or destroyed Nazi infrastructure in daring missions; that pilots of the Polish government-in-exile matched and exceeded their Western comrades in the aircould only enter public discourse in the 1980s, when cracks started to appear in the communists control.

The Solidarity movement, fueled by inextinguishable patriotism and the perseverance of the traditional Catholic faith, pitted millions of ordinary Poles against the foreign-backed regime that preached Marxism and atheism. By 1989, 45 years after the Poles had tried to retake their capital from the Nazis, the Soviets relented. On June 4, general elections were held, and the communist authorities left office in 1990.

Hundreds of people demonstrate in the streets of Warsaw during a May Day rally organised by Trade Union Solidarity on May 01, 1989. (DRUSZCZ WOJTEIC/AFP/Getty Images)

The Polish experience, from the closing months of World War II to 1989, holds continued relevance for those living in the worlds surviving communist regimes. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have participated in a movement to renounce the Communist Party and its affiliated youth organizations. Impoverished North Korea, which has preserved a Stalinist program of absolute social control and military aggression, stands increasingly isolated.

In a speech delivered on July 6 in Warsaw, President Donald Trump tapped into this experience, praising the Poles for standing up to their regimes totalitarian ideology.

Referring to a pivotal 1979 sermon by Pope John Paul II, Trump said: A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, 1million Poles sang three simple words: We Want God.'

Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists. The Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged. Read the whole series atept.ms/DeadEndCom

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch Times.

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The Warsaw Uprising and Poland's Battle With Communism - The Epoch Times

Published time: 26 Jul, 2017 15:30

Indigenous tribes have responded to Philippines President Rodrigo Dutertes threat to bomb their schools because he believes theyre teaching subversion and communism.

Duterte made the threats against the native, non-muslim, Lumad people from the southern island of Mindinao.

READ MORE: Hundreds protest martial law in Philippines, hurl red paint at police

Get out of there, Im telling the Lumads now. Ill have those bombed, including your structures, he said in a press conference on Monday, according to AP.

I will use the armed forces, the Philippines Air Force. Ill really have those bombed... because you are operating illegally and you are teaching the children to rebel against government.

The comments came after the breakdown of peace negotiations between the government and the Communist New Peoples Army (NPA).

The NPA has been waging an insurgency in the Philippines for nearly 50 years and the government believes its using tribal areas in the countryside as its base of operations.

The president's statements hurt us because he does not seem to value our lives, a Lumad spokesperson told Philippine news outlet ABS-CBN.

Indigenous leaders refuted Duterte's allegations that they harbor communist rebels and said that the claims go back to the administration of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

US-based Human Rights Watch condemned the comments and called on Duterte to publicly retract them. They also implored the president to sign a Safe Schools Declaration to protect schools and universities from attacks during war.

Mindanao is currently under martial law due to an uprising by militants linked to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the city of Marawi.

Lumad groups staged a demonstration in Philippines capital Manila on Monday to call for an end to martial law on the island.

Duterte issued the threat at a press conference following his State of the Nation Address on Monday. During that speech he vowed to continue his war on drugs.

The fight against illegal drugs will continue because that is the root cause of so much evil and so much suffering. [Drugs] weakens the social fabric and deters foreign investment from pouring in, he said.

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Duterte's threat to bomb 'communist' schools bewilders indigenous groups - RT

One of the more transparently manipulative and hypocritical slogans used by Western Communist Parties in the mid 1930s to recruit allies for Stalin was specifically designed for Catholics:

You can still take Communion and love the Soviet Union.

Graham Greene, novelist, pundit, and above all, Catholic, embodied this slogan.

Indeed, Greenes attempts to link Catholicism with a Soviet Union that persecuted priests from the get-go predated this slogan. Since the 1920s, Greene had sought to merge his Catholic faith with his Communist one, which prompted George Orwell, a foe of both organized religion and communism, to label Green the first Catholic fellow traveler. But even today, an argument is made that Greene was hostile to Communism in whatever form it took until his death in 1991.

This school of thought relies on criticisms Greene made toward the ideology throughout his life.

Witnessing Communist behavior in Mexico in the 1930s, Greene attacked both Catholicism and Communism for their unconcern with human rights. He later sought to distance himself from his fellow intellectuals who fell hard for Stalin in the 1930s, declaring that Their God failed.

Greene also compared his Church with Stalinist persecution, once writing that, historically, Catholics had their own Stalinist periods, thousands of themTorquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. Visiting Vietnam while still a French colony in the 1950s, Greene expressed that he had a great deal of sympathy for the French in Vietnam.

A decade later, Greene condemned the 1968 Soviet crackdown on their Czechoslovakian satellite as revealing that the days of idealsand ideologies which are their political expressionare certainly over[and] that morality counts for nothing in international politics.

In 1971, he stated that he was against the Russian version of Communism which he disliked even in its post-Stalin form. He even refused the Order of Lenin medal awarded him by the Soviets, but there was a yin to this yang, and the Soviets were on the mark when recognizing that Greene earned such an award.

Even when admitting the great crimes committed by Communistsand CatholicsGreene nevertheless justified said crimes because both had not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent to poverty. As such, he stated that I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

Because of these supposedly shared sentiments, Greene paid both the ultimate compliment by stating that one could easily be a member of both ideologies. There is no reason why a Communist should renounce his Catholic faith, he said.

To find scriptural backing for such a combination, Greene cited the Epistle of James, whose warnings to the rich represented words of revolution.

And although supposedly distancing himself from Soviet communism, Greene nevertheless preferred it over American democracy.

In 1967, a decade after the brutal Soviet crackdowns on Poland and Hungary, both of whom authentically sought the sort of humane revolution Greene supposedly championed, the writer stated his preference for the Soviet Union over the United States:

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States of America, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union. Russians only destroy its body, whereas the Americans destroy its soul.

Greene traced the American war on religious salvation to how solidly anchoredAmerican materialism was in the country. By turns, the less solidly anchoredRussian materialism allowed the existence of a latent sense of religion.

Such religious possibilities Greene cited as the chief reason why I have felt a sort of attraction to Communism.

This bizarre attraction included defending, even admiring on the basis of their faith, Soviet spies who betrayed Greenes country. When his former intelligence boss and friend Kim Philby validated accusations that he was a Soviet mole by defecting to Moscow, Greene lauded the spys faith in Russia as akin to the religious faith of a devout Catholic.

But whatever supposed ambivalence Greene felt toward the Soviets was not in evidence regarding third world communism.

For despite his 50s era support of the French war against Vietnam, Greene opposed American intervention to the extent that he became even more a Communist sympathizer.

Regarding the Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, Greene typically short-circuited any criticisms he had toward Castro such as the dictators authoritarianism with praise. In spite of Greenes awareness of how the regime cracked down on religious freedom, he nevertheless praised Castros fight against so-called American imperialism til the end of the writers life.

Such faint criticisms were not applied, however, to the Stalinist-style Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Instead, he fell unreservedly hard for it because he saw it as merging Church with State.

In contradiction to his characterization of a materialism-free Soviet Union, he praised the Sandinistas for attempting to keep the materialism of both the Soviets and the US at bay by allying with neither (both the Soviets and the Cubans funded the regime in actuality).

Free from such supposed religion-destroying materialism, Greene approvingly saw the regime as having the flexibility to move beyond their policies supporting freedom of religion toward an actual merging of Church with State by allowing Catholic priests into the government. Because of this, Greene gushed that the Sandinista regime was in fact a Roman Catholic government.

When confronted with undemocratic and outright anti-religious behavior of the Sandinistas, Greene still defended the government for its supposed pro-Catholic policies. The regime repeatedly refused free elections (and when they were held under UN supervision, the Sandinista secret police allowed a mob to attack voters standing in line with machetes) as well as persecuting, among others, a Catholic priest named Obando y Bravo for criticizing the actual nature of the regime.

Regarding the Soviets, Greene never gave up his dream of Russia allying with the Catholic Church. In a moist 1987 paean to Gorbachev given in Moscow, two years before the General Secretarys democratic reformsinadvertentlydestroyed the Communist country; Greene wanted the still-totalitarian government to partner with the Catholic Church.

In this speech before the Soviet congress, and Gorbachev, the writer spoke of his dreamthat perhaps one day before I die, I shall know that there is an Ambassador of the Soviet Union giving good advice at the Vatican.

Such an enthusiasm led Greene into opposing the democratic Polish Solidarity movement and instead supporting the Polish Catholics who in turn supported their Soviet-controlled government.

Today, there is nothing particular new about Catholics and Protestants defending Communist regimes on religious grounds (evidence to the contrary, the United Methodist Church credits the Cuban regime for its religious tolerance). But Greene was a pioneer of it, and went far beyond reformed Communist spy Whittaker Chambers famousor depending upon your point of viewinfamous breakdown of religion being about faith in God versus communisms faith in Man.

Instead, Greene subscribed to both faiths and frequently defended his Church partnering with any Communist State, no matter the bloody history of the former and the repressive crackdowns by Communist regimes on their religious citizens.

But Greenes faith in both held fast until his death, and he used them to defend Communism on religious grounds, and vice versa.

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Graham Greene: Catholic Communist - The Liberty Conservative

PITESTI, Romania (AP) An art exhibition went on display Friday at a former Romanian prison where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome re-education program.

The collection of 11 sculptures at the Pitesti Prison, southern Romania, aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place there from 1949 to 1951.

The 3.5 meter-tall (11.5-feet) grey, polystyrene figures depict detainees who were tortured and humiliated to force them to become communists.

Several thousand prisoners who had fallen foul of the communist regime underwent what was known as The Pitesti Experiment. Prisoners were forced to stare at lightbulbs, eat feces, given electric shocks and head butt each other. They were also encouraged to inform on each other and torture fellow inmates. About 100 died from mistreatment.

Alexandru Bogdanovici, who was imprisoned because hed been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, was co-opted to re-educate fellow prisoners. But the prison commander later considered him disloyal and he was beaten, denied water and eventually died.

For the exhibit, artist Catalin Badarau sculpted contorted, anonymous figures which lie in hallways or in former prison cells. One figure stands awkwardly on his head, others have their hands tied behind their backs or are covering their faces.

Badarau says the oversized figures, of a mottled grey color which is similar to the prison walls and floors show the fragility of human beings.

They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks, he told The Associated Press. But conversely, they became spiritual giants.

Among the detainees that survived Pitesti are Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa who spent 21 years as a political prisoner and Corneliu Coposu, an anti-communist politician and well-known dissident who died in 1995.

An estimated 500,000 people, members of the pre-communist intellectual and political elite, were locked up in political prisons until a general amnesty was declared in 1964.

Similar art exhibitions will be held this year in other cities that housed political prisons or had anti-communist revolts, sponsored by the Nasui Collection & Gallery and a government institute tasked with investigating crimes of the communist era.

Badarau said his sculptures challenge people to ask themselves: What would I have done? Would I have become a victim or a torturer, or both?

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Romania: Art exhibit at ex-prison show horrors of communism - WIAT 42