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Our fascination with history shows no sign of fading. We consistently flip through volumes of dusty books to learn more about our past and understand our influence on the world. When we read about intriguing characters or find exciting bits of knowledge we missed in class, we broaden our mental horizons and begin to realize the good and the bad of humanity.
We often applaud and raise toasts to historical heroes who showed kindness and courage to make society a bit better. But unfortunately, there’s no escaping that not every part of our past is worth celebrating. So user rockingkp reached out to fellow members of Ask Reddit to learn more about the dark and disturbing historical events few people know about.
Many users rolled up their sleeves to share the inescapable facts of some of the lowest points in our history. Discovering them might make us feel uncomfortable, but even the worst moments can carry significant lessons to teach us to never repeat them. Scroll down to read the responses and be sure to share your thoughts about them in the comments.
Psst! Just to warn you, though, some of these replies are not for the faint of heart. If you think this might be a bit too much and feel in great need of something positive, check out our recent compilation full of wholesome stories right here.
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#1
Human “experimentation” by Japanese Unit 731 during WWII, committed primarily against innocent Chinese civilians. Nothing I’ve ever heard of in my life, including in fiction, is darker than the horrors committed for years by Unit 731, a military biological and chemical weapons research division of the Japanese Imperial military.
There’s not enough room in a Reddit post to list half of it, but here’s a taste: Dissections of living babies, pregnant women, etc. without anesthesia (also known as a vivisection) usually after they had been deliberately exposed and left to suffer from horrible diseases, chemical and biological weapons, and so on. Freezing limbs off of victims. Horror-movie sadistic surgeries involving cutting off limbs and attaching them to the wrong sides of a victim, or removing organs and connecting the tubes back together without the organs to see what would happen, such as running the esophagus straight to the intestines with no stomach in between.
Not to mention the fact that the victims were routinely tortured for the sake of torture, without even the flimsy excuse of “science” being conducted.
And we’re talking about thousands upon thousands of victims, usually hapless Chinese civilians, political prisoners, POWs, and the homeless, over the course of years in huge facilities with thousands of staff committing these atrocities.
The icing on the cake? General MacArthur and the rest of the US government found out about it when they captured Japan — and they granted Unit 731 immunity for their war crimes so long as they share their findings with America and ONLY America. Many of the former Unit 731 members even went on to have very successful and profitable futures in Japan after the war.
Edit: Based on a couple of the comments I’ve gotten where people are making judgement calls about the modern day Japanese for this - I’d just like to make clear that I hold no prejudice against the Japanese, and I’m certainly not encouraging others to — every country and people has truly horrific pasts, and almost all of them sweep it under the rug as best they can. Even in our generation. We can argue that torture conducted by US soldiers in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, for example, aren’t half as bad, or were more justified, but ultimately torture is torture and sadism is sadism. A culture or government that begins to permit such things and justify them is well on its way down the spiral with enough motivation. Let’s not fool ourselves into comforting racism or nationalism that our countries or people are incapable of atrocities of our own, even today.
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#2
One that really stands out to me is of the Filipino Zoo Girl that was on display in the Coney Island Zoo in 1914. She was bound by ropes and people tossed peanuts at her. It's just heartbreaking to see something like that happen, especially to a child so young.
Many people have no idea that [human zoos] existed, but they are definitely a dark part of history. What's crazy is that there have still been some that have popped up in the 21st century, although not as cruel as they used to be.
#3
The Radium Girls. In the 1920s, they worked at a watch company painting the hours on the watches using radium, a radioactive element that glows in the dark. They did this with no PPE and weren't told radium is dangerous. Meanwhile, the chemists had full PPE and worked in a sealed environment.
Worse, they were instructed to lick the tip of the brush to make a very fine point. Some of them would paint their nails or their teeth with it for fun when they went out at night.
They would develop cancer whenever the paint touched, and many of them had such decay in their jaws that their mandibles had to be held on with bandages.
Monday 2 years ago
It was considered to be a glamourous job too so many young women flocked to these positions. They had to fight tooth and nail to get compensation years later when the dangers of radium finally became public knowledge. There was also a guy who drank huge amounts of radithor (radium infused water) every day until his jaw fell off. Look up Eben Byers if you want to see what a jawless man looks like.
#4
The massacre of kalavrita. It is a village is Greece. The Germans entered it and rounded up all the male villagers in a field. They then shot them all with machine guns. After that they got the children and women and put them in the church. When everyone was inside, they locked the doors and set fire to the church. Around 20 minutes into the burning, a German soldier couldn’t take it anymore and opened the doors. Around half of the people escaped the fire but the rest perished. The German soldier was shot for this, and if you go to kalavrita today his name is on the memorial. No one was punished for this apart from the leader of the division, who I was told by my grandmother that he [perished] in a gulag. But everyone else got away with it. It is sad that no one knows about this, as things like this happened all over Greece and Russia and Poland. I only know about this because my Great grandmother was one who escaped in the church. This massacre was in retaliation for the villagers supporting the local resistance force, which had recently [unalived] about 10 nazis.
Sinkvenice 2 years ago
"Unalived"? I'm pretty sure nobody would be triggered or have an anxiety attack by reading that Nazis were killed.
#5
Mother Theresa being an absolute evil b***h. Letting so many [perish] on her watch, while collecting millions from dictators for the Vatican.
alwaysMispelled 2 years ago
I don't understand why western media treated her like a saint, because they did. I don't remember any 20/20 or frontline stories about her not giving people pain medication because it was good for their souls to suffer, or whatever BS she spouted
#6
Jellyboys
During the 1800s British noblemen in India would use so called jellyboys (local boys smeared in jam) to walk beside them attracting all the bugs, flies and mosquitoes, creating a neat golfing experience for the nobility and a not so neat experience for the boys.
title track 2 years ago
King Pepi II had his slaves covered in honey so as to attract the flies to them and not him around 2280BC
#7
Magdalene asylums, also known as Magdalene laundries. Places of "reform" for women that didn't fit the idea of a good upstanding citizen. The most well known ones were in Ireland. The women and girls were abused and mistreated by asylum staff, most of whom were nuns.
Mass graves, selling these women's children to people in other countries, blocking any parental rights... There's apparently at least one movie coming out, a lot of stories about it, and so many people sharing stories from their mothers and grandmothers. I guess it's more well known than I first thought.
#8
Not many people outside of Canada know about the abusive residential schools many indigenous kids were forced to go to (up until the 90’s!!), but even less know that many were also experimented on in the quest to cure tuberculosis. Truly sick stuff.
Dre Mosley 2 years ago
Pretty much every country with an indigenous population is guilty of mistreating it, sadly.
#9
This is more modern history (current history to be precise) but ...
The Chinese Communist Party actively engaging in Nazi germany style genocide of Uighur Muslims via imprisonment in concentration camps. Forcing them into slave labour and [taking out] them if they do not comply.
There is an estimated 1 million Uighur muslims currently being held in these camps with an undisclosed number of them dead (due to the secrecy of the CCP)
Most people don’t know about this and the ones that do just bury their heads in the sand.
#10
The New London School Explosion. On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the shop teacher at the school in New London, TX turned on an electric sander. Unbeknownst to him, there was a massive natural gas leak under the school. The sander sparked, which ignited the gas and caused a massive explosion that [unalived] almost 300 students and teachers. It was absolutely horrific. The force of the explosion was so great that a two ton block of concrete crushed a car parked 200 feet away. This event is actually why natural gas has a smell now. They started adding it after the explosion so that something like this couldn’t ever happen again.
My grandfather was actually one of the survivors of the explosion. He never talked about it, even to his own family, so I didn’t really know too much about it (other than the fact that he’d survived) until after his [passing]. Toward the end of his life, he’d suffered a series of strokes that left him pretty physically incapacitated, so my dad had given him a voice-activated tape recorder and suggested maybe he could record his memoirs for his grandkids to listen to someday. As it turns out, he did. We have hours and hours of cassette tapes of him telling the story of his (actually very interesting) life, including a big section on the New London school explosion. For the sake of everyone’s privacy, I’ll call my grandfather Papa and use an initial for anyone else.
Papa was in eighth grade when it happened, in his English class at about 3:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon. At the beginning of class, Papa and his buddy T had been messing around and being loud in the back of the classroom (as eighth grade boys often do). His teacher, Miss M, had enough of their disruptions and made Papa switch seats with another student. He moved into the girl’s desk in the front row, and she moved back into his desk in the back of the room. When the school exploded, they were taking a test on the book Ivanhoe. Papa was knocked out for a short time, and when he woke up, he couldn’t see anything because the dust was so thick. He looked down and saw that his pencil had blown clear through his hand. When the dust cleared, he saw that the whole back of the room was gone. I won’t go into details, but there were bodies (and parts of bodies) everywhere. The students in the front half of the room survived. The students in the back half did not. That included Papa’s friend T and the little girl who’d been forced to take Papa’s desk because of his misbehavior at the beginning of class. If he hadn’t been acting up, he would have been [unalived] and she would have lived. He carried the guilt of her [passing] until the day he [passed away].
Papa’s classroom was on the second floor. There wasn’t any way to get to the room other than the open cavity of the explosion. After the few seconds of initial shock wore off, he and another classmate jumped into action. They were the only two kids in the class who hadn’t been badly injured. They made a tourniquet out of a sock and a shoelace for a girl with a severe injury to her arm and dug out their teacher, who was alive, but badly injured. By then, men were running up underneath the hole, so Papa and the other boy started lowering the injured to them. Then those who could walk, including Papa, climbed down. He ran off to look for his older brother, B, to see if he was OK.
As it turned out, B had been supposed to be in Geometry class. However, he and his buddy had snuck out to go fishing. The explosion happened as they were opening the door to head out to the parking lot. The force of the blast sent them tumbling head over foot across the lot. They were both banged up and dazed, but they survived. The rest of their Geometry class was [unalived]. I don’t know that there’s a moral in the fact that both my grandfather and his brother survived because they were misbehaving that day. I do know that it weighed very heavily on both of them for he rest of their lives.
There’s a lot more to his story about the day and the aftermath (most of it absolutely horrific), but I won’t go into all of it here. A few small tidbits though:
- Papa and the boy who helped him rescue the other students from their classroom were both awarded medals and certificates of valor for their actions that day.
- Nearly every family in town lost a child - some all of their children. I’m sure you can imagine the extreme toll this took on everyone’s mental health. Papa described New London in the months following the explosion as a “town with no children.” To help with the healing process, the oil companies actively recruited families with kids to transfer in, so that there was some sense of normalcy when school started again in the fall.
- Papa had played French horn in the school band. However, when school started up again, he was asked to switch to trumpet, as the entire trumpet section had been [unalived].
A few years later, my grandfather went on to fight in World War II, and he saw some of the worst conflict in the Pacific (including Peleliu and the liberation of Manila). But he said that nothing he saw during the war was ever as bad as what he saw the day of the explosion. I’m always amazed that more people don’t know about it. It was major international news at the time.
#11
The Holodomor. Just Google it. Stalin starved around 10 million Ukrainians to further his political agenda. Was absolutely disgusting.
#12
The Children's Blizzard. It occurred in January 1888 on an unseasonably warm day. The weather was nice and many school-kids were tricked into not wearing coats or jackets to school, some only in short sleeves. While the kids were in class, the weather outside changed dramatically from warm and sunny at noon to dark and heavy like a thunderstorm, with heavy winds and visibility at 3 steps by 3 pm. Children left school to go home and do their chores (this was in Minnesota) and were expected to milk the cows and do whatever else was involved in the family farm. But they got lost in the darkness and snow and the wind and many froze in their town, just yards from houses or other sources of refuge. 235 people, mostly children [perished].
There is a novel about the blizzard out now, and there is a nonfiction book about the event as well. I think they have the same title, different authors:
The Children's Blizzard (Nonfiction by David Laskin)
The Children's Blizzard (Fiction by Melanie Benjamin)
MissPrideGirl 2 years ago
Those poor children. I wonder what happened to the parents after the blizzard.
#13
Child marriage in America isn't talked about as much as it should be.
What's worse is that it's *still* a thing.
Nubis Knight 2 years ago
And may become a even bigger thing as in some conservative states the conservative politics press Charge for Lifting the minimal age for getting married so they could marry their underaged child-brides.
#14
The sad case of Ota Benga. He was a “pygmy” boy from the Congo who was essentially captured and brought to the USA to be displayed in freak shows. He had undergone tribal customs such as having his teeth filed into points before his capture.
He eventually got out of the carnivals and dreamed of returning to Africa, then WWI happened, making the trip impossible for the foreseeable future. He [ended himself] by gunshot.
#15
In the US it was common to do invasive surgery on infants without anesthesia until the mid 1980s. It was thought that newborns couldn’t feel pain.
#16
The R*pe of Nanking, a six week episode of mass murder, r*pe, torture, theft, arson, and various other war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers against the Chinese civilians of Nanking (formerly China's capital) during the second Sino-Japanese War. This happened from December of 1937 when the Japanese captured Nanking after a crushing defeat for the Chinese (of varying severity depending on which side you ask) to January of 1938 when the Japanese finished establishing the new "collaborative" government in the city. The body count was massive (estimates range from 40-50,000 to over 300,000), but the massacre is not only remembered for how many people [perished]. It is mainly remembered for the staggering level of cruelty on display, to the point the soldiers even made *games* out of butchering people. One such "game" involved the soldiers throwing babies up into the air and trying to catch them on their bayonets when they came back down. Live burials, castration, brutal r*pe, and the roasting of people became routine then the soldiers started getting bored and thought up even more twisted s**t like hanging people from their tongues on iron hooks, burying them up to the waist and setting hungry dogs on them, or forcing families to engage in incestuous acts. Homes and businesses would be randomly picked out and raided nightly, the Chinese hiding inside all systematically [unalived], r*ped first if they were unlucky enough to be a woman that wasn't elderly or a toddler, and children were not exempt from the worst of it. Just about any horrible thing you can think to do to another person it probably actually happened in Nanking. Even the Nazis in the city at the time were horrified by the carnage, one calling it "the work of b*****l machinery".
#17
The Vipeholm Experiment.
Sweden are mostly known as a not very scary country. With good and mostly accessible dental care.
The Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for the intellectually disabled in Lund, Sweden, were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries (1945–1955). The experiments were sponsored both by the sugar industry and the dentist community, in an effort to determine whether carbohydrates affected the formation of cavities.
The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries.[1] However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics.
Hey, you are institutionalized and suffering and powerless - let's make your teeth rot out of your skull. For uhhh science.
Jaguarundi 2 years ago
Well, it's nice to know that America is not the only country to exploit their institutionalized, and/or mentally handicapped people, for advancing medical science.
#18
British Gulags in Kenya. 1.5 million indigenous Kenyans were placed in concentration camps. Many of them were tortured. Many of them were [unalived]. But all of them suffered, and with silence from the international press. It's ironic that the Brits criticised the Soviet Union for their inhumane gulags yet they had gulags of their own in British Protectorate Kenya. This happened in the 1950s, after the second world war.
juezyparte 2 years ago
If I read unalived one more time I’m gonna kill myself, I’m gonna shoot my brains out… what I mean is: if I have to read unalived till I’m old I think I’m rather gonna commit suicide, of the killing myself variety…
#19
The Ideal Maternity Home here in Canada. From the 1920s till the 1940s, they took in babies from unwed mothers and they were selling them especially to desperate jewish families in New Jersey (adoption was illegal in the US back then).
It was later discovered that the people who ran this business would starve the "unmarketable" babies by feeding them only molasses and water (the babies would last around 2 weeks on this diet). They put the corpses in wooden box often used for butter and that's why the victims are called the Butterbox Babies. The boxes were either buried on the property or at sea or burned in the home furnace. The parents who gave their child to this maternity home would go back and see how their child is doing but were told the child has [passed away] when in fact it had been sold to adopting parents. Between 400 and 600 [passed away] in that home and at least a thousand were adopted but sadly, the adopted babies often suffered from diseases because of the unsanitary conditions and lack of care at the home.
#20
The Cambodian Genocide. You could have been [unalived] just for wearing glasses, therefore being an intellectual (at least this was the Khmer Rouge logic). The prisoners were tortured so badly that they tried to commit suicide in every possibile way, even by using some spoons.
The executions used to be like this: the prisoners were put on a straight line and to the second prisoner was given an object like a shovel or a hammer which he had to use to [unalive] the prisoner in front of him. Then, the same object was given to the third prisoners and the cycle would repeat until there was nobody alive except for the last prisoner on the line, who was then [unalived] by the guards.
Since many medics were [unalived] or sent to work as farmers, the local regime used child medics to conduct experiments on the prisoners: they used teenagers with no knowledge of western medicine to experiment on people without anesthesia. For example, they opened one person's chest just to see his heart beating.
Imho, this s**t is even worse than Unit 731.
Lylan Daina 2 years ago
I highly recommend the book The stones cry out: a Cambodian childhood.
#21
The Cadaver Synod
Basically the pope had a previous Pope's corpse exhumed so the corpse could stand trial for something made up. So they dug up his bloated 7 month old corpse and convicted him, retroactively nullifying his papacy. Then they dumped his bloated and convicted corpse in a river. The people got pissed and overthrew the pope, who was strangled in prison. The next pope came along and had the corpse collected from the river and its papacy posthumously reinstated.
897 was a crazy year.
#22
"Khuk Khi Kai," or the "Chicken Poop Prison" in Thailand. Used by French forces to hold political prisoners (rebellious Thai people) in the Chanthaburi region.
The long-standing impacts of this much-feared torture are still felt in the region today - there's a Thai saying for those who buck authority that roughly translates to "Be careful not to get caught in a chicken poop prison." I learned about this prison from my parents who learned about it from theirs.
____________________
How it worked, was there was a small, 2-story prison. Bottom floor houses the prisoners, and the top floor is basically a huge chicken coop.
The grated floor/ceiling ensures that the chicken poop falls onto the prisoners below.
Apparently, even though the "maximum sentence" in Khuk Khi Kai was around a week, it was one of the most feared punishments there was.
#23
Croatia's Ustachas. Sick radical m***********s. "An ustacha that isn't able to take out a baby from its mother's womb with a blade, isn't a good ustacha." -Ante Pavelic
Some of their most horrific crimes were burning babies infront of their parents, mangling kids from 0-14 y/o with axes, raping girls infront of their mothers, cutting off the ears and noses of their prisoners while being alive. Even the nazis were horrified by these guys methods.
Caro Caro 2 years ago
The Ustaše was a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary. Its members murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma as well as political dissidents in Yugoslavia during World War II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustase
#24
The United Fruit Company’s crimes in Latin America. They perpetrated massacres, slave labour, overthrew governments and generally just ravaged each country they stepped foot in. They left when the soil was dry and no-longer efficient, leaving millions out of work, destabilised governments and still continued to extort locals for years later. It is absolutely disgusting what they did, I encourage everyone to read about it.
#25
In my family's region in Africa they used to carry out the "capital punishment" by snakebite.
Just a snakebite to each ankle, and then letting the man spend his remaining time with his family before he [passed away] (under supervision).
I thought it sounded sort of humane in a way, like our lethal injections, but apparently they say it was one of the most horrific ways that existed.
#26
Once in the seventies, a film crew was filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, and they were shooting at an amusement park fun house kind of thing. A stage hand was moving what he thought was a prop wax figure on a noose, only for one arm to fall off, revealing human flesh and bone underneath. After an autopsy, it was revealed to be the 60 something year old corpse of an old wild west outlaw that had been taxidermied to an extent.
#27
The January 1945 sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. It was a German ship carrying fleeing Germans from the Eastern Front to the West through the Baltic Sea. It was sunk by the Soviet Navy shorty after setting sail. The total [perished] toll is unknown but estimated at over 9000 since there were so many stowaways. It is the worst maritime disaster ever, several times more than the Titanic.
It didn't get nearly the press because they were the enemy so who cares, and the Nazi media certainly didn't report it because they're at the waning days of a war they're badly losing so the last thing they need is more hits to their already sinking morale.
#28
Anyone who's familiar with Mary, Queen of Scots most likely knows that she was beheaded, but many people don't know *how* she was beheaded. My APUSH teacher told my class this story and it's probably one of the most simultaneously interesting, funniest, and saddest executions in history.
The first thing to note was that Mary wore a red dress rather than a white one for a very specific reason: after the execution of a royal or high-class person, commoners would often tear off blood-stained fabric from their clothing solely to flex that they got their hands on the blood of a noble. With red fabric, it would be difficult to see actual blood on the dress. Smart move on Mary's end.
During the actual execution, it was said that Mary's executioner was not very experienced and actually *missed* the initial swing, jamming the axe or whatever weapon they used into the back of her head rather than through her neck. This didn't [take out] her yet, though, and she instead made some sort of medieval olden-time exclamation that can be roughly translated to "goddamn!"
EDIT: After the executioner was done, he picked up her head by the hair, not knowing it was a wig, and the head fell out and rolled onto the floor (thanks Plug_5 and moiochi for reminding me)
After Mary was properly [unalived], her body was left for public viewing, but the audience was surprised to see her red dress start to rustle before allowing Mary's small terrier dog to climb out from underneath. Tragically, the dog refused to leave the body and eventually passed away after staying at the same spot for a lengthy amount of time.
History buffs, please feel free to make any corrections as I heard this story a while ago and probably made a few errors in my recalling! :)
TL;DR: Mary, Queen of Scots avoided crazy memorabilia-savers at her execution with a very intelligent move, got shanked in the head during a failed attempt, the executioner dropped her head onto the floor, and had her dog in her dress with her the entire time
Susie Elle 2 years ago
Jesus christ BP, 'unalived', seriously? Aside from that; that's quite a way to go :/
#29
Margaret Beaufort - mother of Henry VII (father of Henry VIII)
She was married off at age 12 to Edmund (25) who was desperate to get her pregnant as quickly as he could. It was not unusual for members of the aristocracy to marry young. It was slightly more unusual, because of the risk to both mother and child, for them to get pregnant before the age of 14.
Edmund [passed away] of plague while Margaret was pregnant, she was widowed and alone and pregnant during war. The birth was a very difficult one and would scar her forever. For a time they believed that she and her unborn child would perish. Not only was she very young but she was also slight of stature and undeveloped for her age so it’s a wonder she even survived childbirth. It was so difficult for her that she never became pregnant again over the rest of her years, despite remarrying two more times. It is widely believed that she was physically damaged during the childbirth and was unable to conceive again, but it’s also possible she was too traumatized to ever put herself in that situation again. Either way, Margaret devoted herself to her son, calling him “my dearest and only desired joy in this world.”
Aileen Grist 2 years ago
It's as well that the OP didn't say that she dedicated her life- or it would become unalivacated her life to him
#30
The Parsley Massacre.
Dominican dictator really didn't like Haitians, so he ordered Dominican troops to the northern border region, which was fairly loose and undefined at that time (1937), and told the troops to [unalive] any Haitians on the Dominican side which, again, was fairly unclear. How they determined who was Haitian and who was Dominican was based on how they pronounced the word 'parsley'...the vowel sounds in French and Haitian Kreyol make a Kreyol or French speaker saying the Spanish word very obvious.
The reports of what happened are truly horrific...babies on bayonets, head bashed on trees, etc...and somewhere around 15-20K people were murdered in less than a week. Most Haitians have stories about extended family or friends who were hunted like animals and murdered, and it's said that the Dajabòn River is where the murdered souls live...lots of folks won't drink water or wash in the river because it is (still) a river of blood. It ran red during the Massacre.
The DR paid reparations and citizens/survivors in Haiti got about 2 cents as their reparations because of corruption. The DR is still engaged in trying to get rid of anyone that looks Haitian (read: dark-skinned) with regular deportation of even Dominican citizens who might be Haitian descended or are too dark skinned to be Dominican (by state standards). It has created a huge crisis at the border...people are being forced into Haiti and don't speak Kreyol, don't have anywhere to go, and will never find work on Haiti. It's almost like the Massacre never ended...just evolved.
#31
During prohibition the government funded and lead an operation to release barrels of alcohol that they had poisoned to make people sick and shy away from bootleg liquor. Lots of people ended up [passing away] but people still drank more than ever.
Kathryn Baylis 2 years ago
Government “forgotL to warn people about it. Since it had previously been OK to use in making “bathtub gin”, no one thought it would be hazardous. Just ONE warning would’ve saved lives.
#32
The St. Pierre Snake Invasion / The Eruption of Mt. Pelee
Volcanic eruption, Snake attacks, Boiling Mud Slide, Government negligence, Major volcanic eruption, Tsunami.
Population of 30,000 reduced to a population of 2.
In the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, St. Pierre, Martinique was known as the “Paris of the West Indies”. It was renown for its red-tiled cottage, beautiful tropical plants and charming streets. Although most of the population of 20,000 were native Martiniquans, most of the wealthy were Creoles or French colonial officials. The only thing marring this paradise was the volcano looming over its picturesque streets. Citizens of the area were so use to the volcanic activity on the ‘bald mountain’, that no one took it seriously when the fresh steaming vent-holes and earth tremors stared during April 1902.
On April 23, 1902, minor explosions began at the summit of the volcano. By early May, ash began to rain down continuously, and the nauseating stench of sulfur filled the air. The homes on the mountainside were made uninhabitable. Even worse, more than 100 snakes slithered down and invaded the mulatto quarter of St Pierre. The 6-ft long serpents [unalived] 50 people, mostly children, and many animals.
There are reports of horses, pigs and dogs screaming as red ants and foot long centipedes crawled up their legs and bit them. Things came to a head when on May 5, a landslide of boiling mud and water from the Etang Sec crater lake spilled into the River Blanche. Near the mouth of the river, 23 workman were [unalived] in a rum distillery.
This was followed by a tsunami that [unalived] hundreds. This naturally caused concern in the town, and many wanted to leave for Fort-de-France, Martinique’s second most important city. Unfortunately, this all coincided with a national election and public officials wanted to keep people in town to cast their ballots. They convened a committee to assess the danger, with the only scientist involved being a high school science teacher. The report they sent to Governor Louis Mouttet said “there is nothing in the activity of Mt. Pelée that warrants a departure from St. Pierre.” It concluded that “the safety of St. Pierre is completely assured.” On the assurance of that report, people from the countryside flocked into St. Pierre for safety.
They could not have been more wrong.
Three days later, May 8, Mt Pelee finally exploded, sending a murderous avalanche of white-hot lava straight toward the town. Within three minutes, St Pierre was completely obliterated.
There was a V shaped notched cut through the cliffs surrounding the summit crater. This acted as a gun sight pointing down at the town sending super-heated gas, ash and rock down at more than 100 miles per hour. The on slot was enough to move a three ton statue sixteen meters from its base, and blow one meter thick masonry walls to smithereens. It continued down to the shore and hit the ships in the harbor with hurricane force, capsizing several ships killing their crews. The heat set rum warehouses and distilleries ablaze and sent rivers of flaming liquid through the streets.
Of its 30,000 population, there were only two people survived.
Louis-Auguste Cyparis survived because he was in a poorly ventilated, dungeon-like jail cell.
Léon Compère-Léandre lived on the edge of the city and escaped with severe burns. Havivra Da Ifrile, a young girl, reportedly escaped with injuries during the eruption by taking a small boat to a cave down shore, and was later found adrift two miles from the island, unconscious. The event marked the only major volcanic disaster in the history of France and its overseas territories.
Chinmayee Kalghatgi 2 years ago
“Unalived”. What is it with this ridiculous censorship? I am curious in genral. I understand for most swear words since there may be a few kids but why censor words such as “r****m” or “death” in the posts?
#33
The Halifax Explosion.
Regarded by many as the biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of the atomic bomb. A ship laden with explosives collided with another vessel in Halifax Harbour. The resulting explosion flattened much of the city's downtown core, [unaliving] roughly 2,000 and injuring 9,000.
The blast is said to have temporarily displaced the water in the harbour, forming a tsunami that reached up to 15 metres high, surging over the wreckage of the waterfront.
The following day, Halifax was hit by a blizzard that dumped 40 cm of snow on top of the city, further complicating rescue efforts.
The city is also home to a cemetery where many victims of the Titanic were laid to rest. It is said that the body identification system developed at the time of the Titanic's sinking in 1912 aided efforts to identify victims of the Halifax explosion in 1917.
#34
Dekulakization. The soviets [unalived] an entire social class of people. My great grandma was one of them, and witnessed her whole family be slaughtered in front of her. Then was told to run. My grandma was then raised in a gulag. Apparently it's not genocide though, because [taking out] an entire social class doesn't fit the technical definition.
Jonny Man 2 years ago
I recall being in a bar back in early 2013 helping some friends with a gig they had there, Pink Floyd tribute concert. One of the guys we met there was a hardcore Tankie - if you're involved in leftist or progressive politics at all you know the kind. Got a few drinks in him and started spouting off about the necessity of dekulakizing the peasantry back in the day to kill off - sorry, [UNALIVE]-off class enemies. Sick thing is, this stupid jerk would've been first to go if that stuff happened today. Comfortable semi-bourgeois "working class" guy like him? Yeah, they'd've shot him and taken his stuff and that'd be the end of it. Someone oughta do a song called "Tankie Punks F*** Off!"
#35
You know Jameson Whiskey?
Well a long a*s time ago in like the 19th one of their family Heirs fed a little girl to cannibals.
Like legit went and bought a little girl in the Congo as a slave and brought her up to a cannibal tribe because he wanted to see them.
Sick f**k drew pictures of it and s**t as it was happening.
Of course for years the family tried to bury the fact, and the stories and such. Discredit the witnesses.
But the crazy bastard was happy to document the whole thing, his only rebuttal incase it reflected badly on him was that "he wanted to see if they would do it"
And his accounts matched up with the evidence witnesses had provided.
What do you think ?
Zophra 2 years ago
IF BP has to do this much editing, perhaps the article isn't worth posting? Seriously, this is a bizarre amount.
mmph25 2 years ago
The unbelievable censoring is out of control. I never want to read the word unalived ever again.
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Queen fhk 2 years ago
Let me remind you of what type of cruelty that Will be a dark history for the younger generation to come. Well this article has forgotten the atrocities committed by Israeli occupation, killing of Muslims in Al aqsa mosque , About 1,500 Palestinian lost their homes due to an Israeli court rule . How many children were killed in Gaza bombings . Yet how publicly USA came out to support Israel, yet somewhat hypocritically came out to support Ukraine (I also support Ukraine because invasion and killing of lives cannot be justified in any manner). Oh and yet Jews haven't learn from the Holocaust and inflicting such harm on others*bonus fact *state of Israel was formed in 1948. Seems like humanity it's quite the impossible.
CozyPanda 2 years ago
To be fair most Israeli people are against it...especially the proper Jews l. The zionists are the ones who mainly in power
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Little Wonder 2 years ago
Yanno, i get that sponsors don't want their adverts next to words like "killed" or "suicide" but maybe BP just shouldn't run these sorts of articles because honestly it's kind of offensive to downplay these terrible stories with silly words like "unalived".
Yoga Kitty 2 years ago
BP should not accept this kind of bullsh!t - any idiot company that cannot understand basic language is not worth the effort. As soon as people stop reading BP completely because they are sick and tired of reading [unalived] and the like, nobody will see their ads anyway...
Load More Replies... Zophra 2 years ago
IF BP has to do this much editing, perhaps the article isn't worth posting? Seriously, this is a bizarre amount.
mmph25 2 years ago
The unbelievable censoring is out of control. I never want to read the word unalived ever again.
Load More Replies... Queen fhk 2 years ago
Let me remind you of what type of cruelty that Will be a dark history for the younger generation to come. Well this article has forgotten the atrocities committed by Israeli occupation, killing of Muslims in Al aqsa mosque , About 1,500 Palestinian lost their homes due to an Israeli court rule . How many children were killed in Gaza bombings . Yet how publicly USA came out to support Israel, yet somewhat hypocritically came out to support Ukraine (I also support Ukraine because invasion and killing of lives cannot be justified in any manner). Oh and yet Jews haven't learn from the Holocaust and inflicting such harm on others*bonus fact *state of Israel was formed in 1948. Seems like humanity it's quite the impossible.
CozyPanda 2 years ago
To be fair most Israeli people are against it...especially the proper Jews l. The zionists are the ones who mainly in power
Load More Replies... Little Wonder 2 years ago
Yanno, i get that sponsors don't want their adverts next to words like "killed" or "suicide" but maybe BP just shouldn't run these sorts of articles because honestly it's kind of offensive to downplay these terrible stories with silly words like "unalived".
Yoga Kitty 2 years ago
BP should not accept this kind of bullsh!t - any idiot company that cannot understand basic language is not worth the effort. As soon as people stop reading BP completely because they are sick and tired of reading [unalived] and the like, nobody will see their ads anyway...
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