Persecutions, Pogroms and Genocides

Gathers organized violence directed at a religious community by a hostile state, church or mob, rather than a war between comparable armed sides: the Inquisition, Japan's persecution of Kirishitan Christians, the Kulturkampf against German Catholicism, the pogroms against Jewish communities from Odessa to Kielce, the Holocaust and the Farhud, the Yazidi genocides of the Ottoman and colonial periods, the Guatemalan genocide of Maya communities, and the martyrdom of the Uganda converts and the Sikh Gurus whose executions by the Mughal state touched off the Sikh-Mughal Wars. A member belongs here for one side's organized violence against a religious community that could not answer in kind as an army, distinct from the communal riots below, which are more localized and less centrally organized.