To start, I am NOT advocating for purges of any sort.
I was wondering if a political purge has ever achieved the goals they set out to do? Certainly, they are often a means to keep power for those few at the top. But, usually, they are advertised as a means to a “better” society. Clear out the malcontents and riff-raff and there will be a golden age.
But, I cannot think of any that have come anywhere close. They are nothing but horror shows. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, the French Revolution (not sure who to pin that on), Juan Perón, Augusto Pinochet and so on (not meant to be a complete list…just examples).
Were any meant to have high ideals and went wrong or is it all men getting power mad and running amok?
Well Castro did get organized crime and American corporate oligarchs out of Cuba, but at a very high price in other areas by becoming a puttet for the Soviet Union. Still, this was seen as a positive thing by Castro and his revolutionaries.
If you were Stalin, or any of those, eliminating any possible rivals and troublemakers was a better society and a golden age - and all available media were used to persuade the surviving populace it was so as well.
At least, unlike most dictatorial purgers, he stepped down on his own.
He didn’t succeed ultimately, though; his purges didn’t eliminate threats to the Republic, they showed ambitious men exactly how to subdue the Republic.
Tell that to the ones who had their property confiscated, some tarred and feathered, and felt they had to leave for Canada, Britain and the Caribbean, for their personal safety or to be able to express their political views freely.
From the Wikipedia article, the number expelled was about 88,000.
The number killed in the French Terror was about 45,000.
France had a larger population than the 13 colonies: 28 million in 1789, compared to 2,400,000 for the colonies in 1775.
The US doesn’t need any help looking bad in its early history; it does that all on its own, through its treatment of Black slaves, its dealings with the Native Americans, and the wars with Mexico.
And making life miserable for monarchists, enough so that 10%-20% of them got fed up, took their slaves, and took free land from Daddy George - that was not a nice thing for the US to do either (although it pales in comparison to keeping hundreds of thousands of slaves, which the revolutionaries also did). But it isn’t a purge.
No, I don’t have sympathy for the political position “I really really really want to simp for King George”. However…
Do you think I have sympathy for the political position “I want to be a bigshot in Rome”, that Sulla purged?
Whether I agree with the position being purged has very little to do with whether I identify the purge as a purge. It’s really, really simple: if you go in and kill a bunch of people for their political position, that’s a purge. If you don’t, that’s not.
And by the way:
Why are you comparing deaths to refugees? 100-150k people fled the French Revolution, so [habdful dead +88k left] < [thousands dead +150k left] so I’d say the French Revolution was the bigger purge.
And by the way, I say that despite my sympathy for French revolutionary positions, and my lack of sympathy for the political position of “I really really really want to simp for King Louis”, so you can see that my personal preferences don’t have shit to do with whether I identify something as a “purge”.
If you define purge to mean only by means of executions, so be it. But that means the Cuban opponents to the revolution weren’t purged, either. They were political refugees, exiled, but not purged.
But that’s a pretty narrow definition, based on what the OP appears to be asking. A political purge is normally thought of as getting rid of political opponents. Exiling large numbers of ideological opponents of the regime seems to me to be a purge, because it may solidify political support for the regime, which is what OP is asking about.
Would it make you feel better if I made fun of the other Daddy George too? The one who owned a shitload of human beings and used their teeth to make his dentures?
Was there a purge? Or did everyone flip to, “Who, me? I had not part!” Plus, I thought the Allies pardoned basically everyone but a few for the Nuremberg trials. So, not really a purge.
ETA: I think the Allies were similarly easy on Japan. Wasn’t that the point of the Marshall Plan? To not purge?
Is France a monarchy? No? Then the purge worked. Oh, there were some little hiccups on the way from there to now, but the Revolution met its goals and the French are better for having gone through it.
From the Wikipedia article on Allied denazification in West Germany:
One of the punishments for Nazi involvement was to be barred from public office and/or restricted to manual labor or “simple work”. At the end of 1945, 3.5 million former Nazis awaited classification, many of them barred from work in the meantime. By the end of the winter of 1945–1946, 42% of public officials had been dismissed.