Srdja Trifkovic  writes about the 20th century as the worst century for Christian martyrdom (45 million).

This carnage dwarfs any of the crimes of the Inquisition or of the conquest of the Americas and dwarfs in absolute terms any previous Christian martyrdom, even under the Romans:

According to the respected and reliable OUP World Christian Encyclopedia (2001), there have been many more Christian martyrs in the 20th century–over 45 million–than in all of the preceding 19 centuries of Christianity. Of that number, some 32 million were killed by “atheists” and over 9 million by Muslims. The “atheists” denote, overwhelmingly, Soviets and their Communist cohorts and satellites, but also include Nazis and their allies. The Spanish Republic was an especially efficient Christian-killing machine. In terms of the size of the targeted population and the timespan of only two and a half years, the Compañeros did almost as well as the Tovarishchi.

It may be argued that among the Bolsheviks’ victims many were slaughtered not because they were Christians-as-such, but because they were “objectively” real or potential enemies of the state, i.e., Tsarist army officers and aristocrats, peasant farmers (“kulaks”), artists, academics, or middle class professionals. But while it would be admittedly erroneous to count every Christian, however nominal, who died under Communist persecution as a “New Martyr,” there is no doubt:

1. that Christians were targeted with particular ferocity for the very reason of their faith;
2. that the Russian Orthodox Church and other Christian confessions–notably Eastern Rite Cattholics–were subjected to systematic destruction on a titanic scale; and
3. that the majority of victims targeted for supposedly “secular” reasons of class, profession, or political beliefs, were also Christian believers whose faith was inseparable from other traits of their personality.

We’ll never know how many of those countless victims were “in a situation of witness for the Faith” at the moment of death, which is the convential definition of martyrdom. Of the mental state of the killers, however, and specifically of their intention to eradicate Christianity by whatever means, there is no doubt at all. In 20 years (1918-1938) the number of churches that remained open in Russia was reduced from 54,000 to under 500–to less than one percent, that is, of the pre-Bolshevik total. In all some 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, 120,000 monks and nuns, and millions of laypeople were martyred for the Orthodox Faith in Russia in the five decades after 1918. The survivors were also confessors: they survived, but theirs was a living martyrdom…….
…Attempts at “killing the soul” started only months after the Revolution of 1917. Irina Skariatina remembered the desecration of her church while Metropolitan Benjamin was serving an all-night vigil in Petrograd in 1918 when the church was surrounded by hundreds of soldiers who subsequently broke in, talking, laughing, swearing, smoking, spitting loudly:

They came up the aisle to the altar where the Metropolitan and twelve assisting bishops and archimandrites were officiating and, pushing them aside, prodded the golden coverings of the altar with their bayonets (“to see if any firearms were concealed,” they explained), then threw cigarette ashes into the Chalice and finally spat into it, throwing it on the ground as they left the altar on their way out. The congregation, paralyzed with horror, did not move at first. Then suddenly it broke loose, a multitude of people maddened by the outrage, all acting under the same impulse of boundless indignation. In a second the soldiers were stopped, surrounded, and would probably have been torn to pieces alive (despite the fact that they were armed and the congregation was not), had not the Metropolitan come forward and called out in a loud voice the words of Christ: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” adding, “Let them go in peace and do not leave your places for we shall proceed with the service.” He was obeyed, of course …

Such fortitude did not save him from the firing squad in 1922. Patriarch Tikhon, amidst the rising ocean of blood, called on his flock to share the cup of martyrdom: “If it becomes necessary to suffer for the sake of Christ, we call upon you, beloved sons and daughters of the Church, we call upon you to suffer to-gether with us. If a redeeming sacrifice is required, the death of the innocent sheep of Christ’s flock, I bless the faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ to pain and death for His sake.”

By that time the mind-boggling scale of the Soviet killing machine made obvious a fundamental difference between anti-Christian pogroms carried out by Muslims in the previous 13 centuries and those perpetrated by 20th century totalitarians.”

Trifkovich, sadly, fails to notice the million or more Muslims killed in Iraq and other countries by Zionist Christians or their allies, the blow-back from which drives Islamic violence. He fails to reveal that Islamicist violence is often manufactured or instigated. He fails to analyze both Muslims and Socialists as tools of a more subtle and calculating power.

Even so, he is right to warn Western Christians that they too face a future of persecution:

The New Martyrs’ example and their legacy is precious, because in this, 21st century, it will be the turn of Western Christians to experience martyrdom. In Western Europe they will be persecuted by the unholy alliance between the postmodern, Christophobic velvet totalitarianism of the therapeutic hyper-state, and a resurgent Islam which already accounts for a quarter of all newborns in France. In the United States they will be persecuted for refusing to accept the destruction of the moral foundation of the society, currently epitomized by abortion, by “gay marriage,” and by the ever-expanding speech and thought codes. Instead of being thrown to the lions or sent to Siberia, the resisters will be subjected–by some monstrous mechanism devised by an ever more activist judiciary–to the mandatory “sexual diversity orientation sessions,” or feminist-led pro-abortionist “right-to-choose education workshops,” or “immigrant rights sensitivity training,” after which the continuing refusal to recant will lead to compulsory “therapy” and forced medication. This scenario is not farfetched on either side of the Atlantic. Western Christians should be prepared for martyrdom.”