The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned. What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most modest reform movements as communist or communist inspired.”
