The Purge: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

When a character, usually a villain, takes over [[The Government]], [[The Syndicate]], the [[Ancient Conspiracy]], or otherwise takes power in some way, often the first item on the character's agenda is ordering the deaths of many characters. These aren't just [[Muggles]], though; these are characters we know (and possibly love) from before, killed off in a quick montage in various locales. No big ceremony, just them dying horribly. Hits home just how powerful the guy is.

* ''[[Judge Dredd (film)|Judge Dredd]]''. Rico and Ilsa manage to massacre more than a hundred street Judges due to {{spoiler|Griffin}}'s knowledge of Judge procedures, security measures and scrambled radio frequencies.

* ''[[G.I. Joe: Retaliation]]'' has [[President Evil|Zartan-disguised-as-President]] ordering the destruction of the Joe base.

 

 

** Arthas is practically the embodiment of this trope; he purges the city of Stratholme to stop the citizens becoming undead, he purged ''the entire kingdom'' of Lordaeron after he became undead. "Purge" is probably one of his top ten words.

* In ''[[Modern Warfare|Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2]]'', {{spoiler|General Shepherd betrays Task Force 141 and personally executes Roach and Ghost. His men then start killing off the remaining members of the force. Price, Soap, and Nikolai are the only known survivors at the end of the game}}.

** {{spoiler|Regardless of your actions, the Right of Annulment is ''always'' invoked for an eighteen time, and many mages of the Kirkwall Circle die}}, in the end of ''[[Dragon Age II]]''.

** Also, if [[The Evil Prince|Bhelen]] becomes King of Orzammar, he immediately orders the execution of his rival Lord Harrowmont. In Dragon Age II, it's revealed that his purged has extended to Harrowmont's relatives.

** Same thing - but worse - happened after [[Red October]]. During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks quickly executed some representatives of the old regime. As the months went by and the ensuing civil war intensified, the purge grew into a [[Reign of Terror]]. In fact, ''all'' the factions involved in the civil war (the White Army, the Anarchists, the Czech Legion etc.) conducted purges of some sort - though they had different targets. Oh, and it was a very ''mobile'' war. That is, sometimes this "shoot the previous Mayor, Town Council and anyone you don't like who happened to be around" routine was done ''repeatedly''.

* During the early first century BC, Rome went through a bloody purge when Marius seized power, then Sulla's proscription. About forty years later, the Second Triumvirate held their own proscriptions, referred to in Shakespeare's ''[[Julius Caesar]]''. Later emperors' struggles with the senatorial order were frequently depicted as purges by historians.

* The origin of the word "decimate" comes from the practice of killing every tenth man, drawn by lots, in a rebellious city or military unit.

* Kind of a feature of Chinese governments since the fall of the Empire of the Qing. Most notable would be the anti-rightist purge of the early 1950s, when the amnesty the Chinese Communist Party had afforded to all those who had defected to their cause in the course of the Civil War was ignored in favour of re-education camps and killing fields. About the same time came the National land reform, which saw particularly wealthy peasants being denounced as 'feudal' and 'bourgeois'; most if not all of said citizens' land and property was confiscated. Many of them and their families did not survive this process. There are no numbers for the number of defectors imprisoned/executed - it couldn't have been more than a couple of million - but we're fairly sure that about a million 'landlords' must've died at the hands of their neighbours under the Party's supervision.