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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.

#1

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

SAM5TER5 , wikimedia.commons Report

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#2

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

-eDgAR- Report

#3

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

Damn_Dog_Inappropes , wikimedia.commons Report

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#4

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

Zaffa_07 , wikimedia.commons Report

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#5

Mother Theresa being an absolute evil b***h. Letting so many [perish] on her watch, while collecting millions from dictators for the Vatican.

RagsZa Report

#6

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

Horseoftravertine , Markus Avila Report

#7

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

quietfangirl , wikimedia.commons Report

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#8

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

xtrabi , wikimedia.commons Report

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#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.

Ket_amine_bandit Report

#10

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

pepperjones926 , wikimedia.commons Report

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Monday
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

There's a documentary on this one available on Youtube from the channel BadHQ. It's called Disasters Of The Century | New London School Explosion if anyone is interested.

Roberto Alonso Lago
Community Member
2 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Followed your lead and learnt it is actually Bad Day HQ (there is a bad day HQ channel, but that's not it). Here's a link to the video. Thanks! https://youtu.be/WOn6p-B9v2o

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Alma Muminovic
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Thank you! Im glad to see Im not the only one who found it extremely irritating to sensor killed/died with another more awkward word that means the same thing! If people cant handle the word ‘killed’ then maybe don't read any of this article.

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J F
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

stop with th unalived nonsence its dead,.. unalived is not a word for the love of god please stope with this woke nonsense.

Zero
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Multiple sites sensor variations of the word "dead". This is a way of getting around those sensors... for now.

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Rodney Bowie
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Is one of the entries in "Dark Little Known History Events" going to be that Bored Panda censored the word "killed" and went with "unalived." We're looking through a list of horrible, horrible events but we can't handle the word "killed?"

Mr Zipperface
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Yet they didn't have a problem with "death" or "bodies/parts of bodies".

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Suezn
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Unalived is the stupidest censorship ever. Even spellcheck doesn't like it.

Shelli Aderman
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Saying, “[unalived],” as opposed to, “Killed,” actually makes you think about it MORE, because your brain takes an extra moment to translate the word, and THUS, LINGERS ON IT! 🙄🤦🏽‍♀️

Scagsy
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Tragic. All those young lives lost. But what about Papa? What a remarkably interesting memoir he must have left. So many of our elderly people are marginalised but have fantastic stories to tell.

Polar_bear_lover
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I've actually heard this story before, but not with this much detail. It is incredibly sad that so many people died.

Kimberly Herbert
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

The rotten egg smell added to natural gas is because of this tragedy. Also, Texas has strict qualifications for who can be an engineer to avoid amateurs connecting natural gas lines to buildings like the setup that caused this tragedy.

Lori Sandoval
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I believe it is called mercaptan. I used to work in facilities management at the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. A few months after Tan Hall, a new chemical engineering lab building opened, it was discovered that the gas used for busses burners didn't have that smell (i.e., odorless). Turns out the piping used to transport the gas was of such a porous nature it ended up absorbing the mercaptan. As it was a safety issue (not being able to tell if the gas was on or if there was a leak) they shut down gas to that building until they found a solution.

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Marianne
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"Unalived"?? This sounds so much worse than killed...like it's a joke or something...

Tobias the Tiger
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Agreed, the usage of words like "unalived" in these posts just makes me think that they're making light of some serious issues.

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Catherine Spencer-Mills
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Reading this, I have every sympathy for the town and those who died. Died. Not "passed" or "passing" or "unalived" for crying out loud. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Grow up people. And before anyone gets snotty, my parents are dead, my MIL and FIL are dead, my ex is dead. Not "passed" dead.

Brenda
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

OMG! I can't even imagine how hard it must have been for the surviving 😪

lara
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What in the hell does unalived mean? Is Panda censoring "killed"?

Mokayokok
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Can we quit using the word unalived? It’s so stupid & if you are that freaking sensitive then don’t read s**t like this.

Sergy Yeltsen
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I worked on a power station that ran on gas, and the odourant they add to it - undiluted - will make you sick to the point of dry heaving. Makes me wonder why they can't add something similar to petrol to stop petrol-sniffing that a lot of people undertake.

G07 Stella Cortes Harb
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I've read lots of stories about this event, survivor stories too, and this story matches up with one person, Bill Thompson.

LolaCat
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

OK, BP, you have to stop with this ridiculous censoring. "Unalived"? No, they were killed, murdered, massacred. They died. They are dead. HTH.

Joe Reaves
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

His story sounds very similar to another boy's survival story, except he wasn't moved for misbehaving. He asked the girl in front of him to swap with him because he had a crush on the girl in front of her. The person he swapped with died and he felt guilty for years. At a memorial service on one of the anniversaries decades later he told the story to her family and apologised and they made it very clear he was in no way responsible for what happened. It was just chance. I hope it gave him a little peace after carrying that burden for so long.

PenguinQueen
Community Member
1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Wow thank you for sharing this, I would have treasured these kinds of tapes from my grandparents

ThatOmniCapybara(she/they)
Community Member
1 year ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Will BP STOP THE DAMN CENSORING?! It makes it sound like you shouldn't talk about death. How old do they think we are, five?

Shaun Coleman
Community Member
1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Natural gas has a smell because the Germans started adding mercaptan in the late 1800s. I have no idea why American gas companies would not have done the same thing. I guess they just didn't care.

Cissie McCree
Community Member
1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Why the crazy usage of the word “ unalived” ? What does it mean? It means “ dead” “ killed” . If you change the word does the meaning change ? Of course not. Trigger words b******t oops sorry - “ cattle c**p”

Hypoxia Smurf
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What's with this [unalived] crud? Is it unlawful here to write k-i-l-l-e-d?

Draven Potter
Community Member
2 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

OP is “T” Tom Howard Guinn? If so, his younger sister (2 y/o at the time of this event) recently passed away,

Cheyenne
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

“Unalived”? There is no such word. Stop treating your readers as if we were three years old. The censorship is getting ridiculous. They were killed. Period.

Wendy Herman
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

It's rather ridiculous that one needs an encyclopedia to write about death, using words that won't upset anyone when conveying Truths about one of Life's few absolute certainties. Avoiding the word won't keep it away. Also, wishing comfort to those who are grieving any aspect of it, and missing anyone they love being "unalive", past or present. That pain eases over time, becoming less sharp & cutting, but never vanishes. We should at least be able to talk openly about it. Just sayin'.

Debbie Steele
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Please. Stop using " unalived" it's distracting and it's triggering me. Is it meant to be disrespectful? When I have to stop reading to consider some dumb new word, which has no impact or meaning, ( I guess I am to assume that unalive means dead, but if that's the case, just say dead. Maybe it means breathing but still. Just write dead. We can handle it.) That was a tragic story.

Jim Smith
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

New London received a telegram of condolence from Adolf Hitler, then Chancellor of Germany.

Shaun Coleman
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What's with the stupid [unalived] censoring? Are people now so sensitive they can't bear looking at the correct words? Truly pathetic.

L.a. Williams
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I hope someone in his life told him over and over that he did great. Not all kids would've had the mind set to help. Not his fault.

Naiya
Community Member
2 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

STOP SAYING "UNALIVED" FFS. You cannot sugarcoat horrors by changing letters and words around.

Fiona Harvey
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I really can't see that BP wouldn't let the word "killed" be used. This is not the 1930s.

Thomas Turnbull
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

STOP USING “UNALIVED” ITS JUST STUPID SAY KILLED OR DIED.

Shelley Dawson
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What's this use of 'unalive'? it's not a word, it has no meaning. I have been a native speaker of English all my life. i have a high standard of education and am very well read. I have looked in the dictionary.

Sue Kozin
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Unalived. Come on people, They were killed. They died. Are we suddenly afraid of the truth with our words. Bored Panda, it is time to return to reality. Or, maybe it is time to get rid of RIDDIT.

Angela Philp
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Having so many cassettes of your grandfathers to listen to is such a gift. Not only having all these stories passed on but all in his voice too, that's pretty incredible

Ren
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Using "unalived" just makes it sound like BP is making a joke out of these tragedies. You're not helping anyone, you're making a mockery of those who suffered.

Ti Al
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Censorship on BP is getting ridiculous. When it's out of fear of losing some faint-hearted advertisers, maybe users should start to take a stand.

Michelle Reynolds
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

My heart goes out to your grandfather. I would love to hear some of those tapes. Most WW2 survivors are gone now and since mental health is a relatively new concept for soldiers, these poor people suffered in silence. I am a nurse for elderly patients and love to hear their stories and thank them personally for their sacrifices.

Jan Olsen
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Will you PLEASEstop writing "unalived" - the word is killed. KILLED!!!!

Karl Leaning
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

BP, by using the [unalived] rather than killed, you are belittling the event. this is childish, churlish, and must stop. grow up and grow some balls.

James Twong
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Bored Panda please atop this ridiculous 'unalived' thing. It makes you look stupid.

Rainy Day Wolf
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This is a terrible accident... but I thought the list was about horrific things humans have done purposefully. Maybe I misunderstood.

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#11

The Holodomor. Just Google it. Stalin starved around 10 million Ukrainians to further his political agenda. Was absolutely disgusting.

askmedeepquestions Report

#12

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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)

floridianreader , wikimedia.commons Report

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#13

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About Child marriage in America isn't talked about as much as it should be.

What's worse is that it's *still* a thing.

SpaceCowboy58 , __ drz __ Report

#14

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

anon , wikimedia.commons Report

#15

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

ArGrastaDe , cottonbro Report

#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".

PaleRider1955 Report

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#17

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

ipakookapi , wikimedia.commons Report

#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.

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#19

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

Pomsan , wikimedia.commons Report

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#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.

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#21

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

Intense_as_camping , wikimedia.commons Report

#22

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About "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.

entlp , wikimedia.commons Report

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#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.

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#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.

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#25

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

nonodru3 , Alfonso Castro Report

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#26

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

BakedBrotato76 , wikimedia.commons Report

#27

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

llcucf80 , wikimedia.commons Report

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#28

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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

kimneedstochill , wikimedia.commons Report

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#29

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.”

scouseconstantine , wikimedia.commons Report

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#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.

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#31

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

maceman486 , wikimedia.commons Report

#32

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

wildsea_ , wikimedia.commons Report

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#33

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

keoura , wikimedia.commons Report

#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.

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#35

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About 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.

MurrayMan92 , wikimedia.commons Report

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#36

I am surprised nobody has mentioned the Atrocities in the Congo Free State perpetrated by Belgian King Leopold II. His tenure was responsible for about 10 million deaths in Congo, not to mention numerous other Congo residents whose hands were chopped for not meeting rubber cultivation quotas.

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#37

**The Battle of Hayes Pond**. Robeson County, North Carolina. January 18, 1958.

During the 1950s, the Lumbee Indians made nationwide news when they came into conflict with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan headed by Klan Grand Dragon James W. "Catfish Cole. At that time, Cole had began a campaign of harassment against the Lumbee, claiming they were "mongrels" and "half-breeds" whose "race mixing" threatened to upset the established order of the segregated Jim Crow South. After giving a series of speeches denouncing the "loose morals" of Lumbee women, Cole burned a cross in the front yard of a Lumbee woman in St. Pauls, North Carolina, as a "warning" against "race mixing." Emboldened, Cole called for a Klan rally on January 18, 1958, near the town of Maxton. The Lumbee, led by recent veterans of the Second World War, decided to disrupt the rally.

The **"Battle of Hayes Pond"**, also known as "the Klan Rout", made national news. Cole had predicted more than 5,000 Klansmen would show up for the rally, but fewer than 100 and possibly as few as three dozen attended. Approximately 500 Lumbee, armed with guns and sticks, gathered in a nearby swamp, and when they realized they possessed an overwhelming numerical advantage, attacked the Klansmen. The Lumbee encircled the Klansmen, opening fire and wounding four Klansmen in the first volley, none seriously. The remaining Klansmen panicked and fled. Cole was found in the swamps, arrested and tried for inciting a riot. The Lumbee celebrated the victory by burning Klan regalia and dancing around the open flames.

The Battle of Hayes Pond, which marked the end of Klan activity in Robeson County, is celebrated as a Lumbee holiday.

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#38

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

If I remember correctly, Between 1932 and 1972 they basically had around 600 all black subjects where they treated syphilis on some patients, and then faked most to others, just to see how the disease would attack the body. Like the ones they were fake treating told them “oh you’re good. You’ve been treated for this s**t.” And they continued to get worse and be documented it. This is also the time we discovered that aspirin was called a “miracle drug” for the relief it gave these patients in back aches, headaches, etc. These people, may I remind you not a single one of them was white, were treated like lab rats. To this day I’m still in shock that for over 40 these so called scientists had the moral turpitude to perform such atrocities on other human beings, and at the end of it all day “eh. It was for science.” Disgusting.

NoSoupFerYew , wikimedia.commons Report

#39

When the women's pill was introduced in the 1960s it contained approximately 40 times more estrogen and progesterone, which causes cancer. The pill was tested on marginalized Puerto Rican women because there were no birth control laws and it was close to the US. The inventor of the pill, whose sponsor and rep was Gamble of Proctor & Gamble, was pro-eugenics and thought that the poor should be cleansed. Women died quickly, the side effects were horrific and long lasting, and many women died of ovarian cancers years after the tests. [https://www.history.com/news/birth-control-pill-history-puerto-rico-enovid](https://www.history.com/news/birth-control-pill-history-puerto-rico-enovid)

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#40

There's a surprising amount of people that don't know about the Rwanda genocide that happened pretty recently (like when Bill Clinton was president). Basically there were two "types" of Rwanda natives: the Hutus and Tutsis. The Hutus believed the Tutsis were invaders of land that was theirs, and after the assassination of the Rwandan leader (who was a Hutu), the Hutus were ordered to "chop down the tall trees" which meant [unalive] the Tutsis.
The "differences" between Hutus and Tutsis were that Hutus were supposedly darker-skinned, shorter in stature, and had shorter faces. That's why the Tutsis were called "tall trees."
The events that followed [unalive] so many Tutsis, yet the UN was stingy to call it a genocide (they never like using that term because of its association with WWII and the Nazis). It wasn't until very recently that the [unalivings] stopped. To this day, Hutus and Tutsis that survived the genocide speak at events side-by-side speaking about how terrible the events were.

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#41

Japanese Comfort Women.

Basically, after a Japanese military unit occupied a village, they would ship out the more attractive females to sites where military officers would routinely r*pe them. Many were as young as 14 and would be separated from their family. This went on for a whopping 13 years.

Ironic how a society with so much devotion to honor committed such an unfair and unborable atrocity.

What's scarier about this is how these ra*pe camps likely inspired many Hentai creators when making their content, which would explain a lot.

anon Report

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#42

The Armenian Genocide. The exact numbers of people that died isn’t even know, but historians speculate around 1.5 to 2 million people were [unalived] during it. Very horrible event that has been brushed under the rug.

anon Report

#43

1989 Tiananmen Square protests

In what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded.

Many were crushed by the tanks as well. The People’s Liberation Army power washed all the blood and guts down the drain.

Abrera Report

#44

I think that many people are unaware of the history of mental health institutions/ asylums. There was widespread use of asylums in the past two centuries (esp in europe and north america) and they were effectively used to store anyone who society deemed undesirable. So yes, people with mental illnesses, but also unmarried women, the lgbt population, ethnic and religious minorities, etc. When you look at the use of asylums/ mental institutions in europe, it echoes the history of mass incarceration in america in some respects.

People in mental health institutions/ asylums were often turned into forced labourers and they were used as guinea pigs for medical experiments and drug trials. There was also the widespread use of psycho surgery (i.e. lobotomies, etc).

Unfortunately, institutions are still widely used in europe today, especially in central and eastern europe. In many jurisdictions, people in institutions lose the right to manage property or make their own decisions. This means they cannot discharge themselves and their relatives assume control of their property. This has incentivised many to place their relatives is institutions in order to legally steal from them by assuming control of their property. I know that some people might think that people who need to be institutionalised cannot control their own property anyways, but one of my colleagues recently represented a man who was institutionalised by a court because he had mild depression. His mother applied to institutionalise him on the basis of his diagnosis and the judge approved it by simply signing a form after looking at his medical records- he never even met the man, and my colleague's client did not know that his mother made an application for his detention until people showed up at his house to take him away. His mother then gained control of his bank accounts.

One in four people have a mental health condition. This is an extreme example, but think about how many people are vulnerable to this type of treatment if they happen to live in a jurisdiction that has this type of procedure for institutionalization.

I didnt expect to go on such a ramble, but hopefully I informed a person or two about an interesting part of recent history, which isnt actually historical at all in some parts of the world.

Source- I have a master's in disability and mental health law, I work as a legal representative for people in mental health facilities, and I have worked as a legal researcher for mental health law reform on the international arena (I dont want to disclose my former employer but they are a well known intergovernmental organisation).

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#45

The death of Roger Williamson, at the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix.

In the 1970s era of Formula 1, the cars weren't far off from being an overpriced metal coffin on wheels, surrounded by highly flammable fuel, and during the Dutch Grand Prix, this became painfully obvious indeed.

Roger Williamson crashed out after a tyre puncture, and his car came to rest upside down, with him trapped inside. He was not seriously hurt by the crash, but then the fuel tank ignited and the car burst into flames. Another driver named David Purley was behind Williamson when the crash occurred, and he saw the whole crash unfold. Purley stopped his car on the other side of the track, *ran across an active race track*, and proceeded to try and save Williamson's life.

This is where the dark part of it comes in, and depending on your sensibilities, downright outrageous and disgraceful. *None* of the trackside marshals had *any* fireproof equipment, which prevented any of them from helping Purley to right the burning car; they also had a grand total of *one*, yes *one* fire extinguisher between them, which was incapable of putting out the flames. Additionally, not a *single* other driver who saw the calamity stopped to help, despite Purely's frantic waving to them, to try and get anyone to assist in saving Williamson's life. Meanwhile, Race Control decided *not* to halt the race *despite a flaming wreck being present on-track*, and it took almost 10 minutes before the fire engine arrived on-site, by which point, Williamson had asphyxiated from the smoke and flames. As soon as the fire was out, they simply put a blanket over the burned-out car and continued racing. Later on, other drivers and the race controllers would claim that they assumed Williamson's car was actually Purley's, and that there was no-one at risk at that time; something that the many hundreds of people within the grandstands would strongly disagree with, there. Yeah, Williamson burned to death right in front of a grandstand packed with spectators, who all got a front row seat to watching Williamson die before their very eyes.

So there you have it; a young, promising driver slowly being burnt alive over the course of 10 minutes; a second driver desperately trying in vain to save his life; a group of marshals woefully underequipped for the job; indifferent drivers; incompetent race control and a disaster which shook Formula 1 to its core.

As a result of this debacle, changes were made to try and avoid this type of event occurring again in the future. The biggest change was the mandate that marshals should wear fireproof clothing, and it was also noted that drivers were more willing to stop at accident sites to assist in rescuing fellow drivers; This was most clearly seen during the 1976 German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring Nordschleife, where Guy Edwards, Harald Ertl, Brett Lunger and Arturo Merzario all pulled over to assist in getting Niki Lauda out of his burning Ferrari, after the infamous crash that took him out of the German, Austrian and Dutch Grands Prix.

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#46

Mother and Baby homes here in Ireland. Most Irish people will know about this, but most people from other countries don’t.

Basically, mother and baby homes (or laundries) were places run by nuns where women would be sent if they got pregnant before marriage, and would do all the laundry from people who sent their dirty clothes to the homes until they gave birth.
During childbirth they would be provided with no real medical procedure, anaesthesia etc, and the nuns would often verbally abuse them during the process for being so sinful as to have sex before marriage.
When the baby was born, the umbilical cord was cut and that was the last contact the mother would have with the baby. Ever.
The nuns would only ever rarely let the baby live, and if they did it would be abused by the nuns it’s whole childhood for being the product of sin.
But, most of the babies didn’t survive, and you would think, maybe, they would be [unalived] humanely.
Nope.
Dropped into a septic tank.
They’ve all been shut down now obviously, but they ran until the late 70s I believe. During excavations they would find the remains of around 300 newborn babies for each home.

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#47

Near the end of ww2 the soviets in their invasion of Germany and Easter Europe would burn villages [take otu] civilians and r*pe innocent woman. One woman in Berlin after the occupation of the city said “how many times” to another woman in the city in reference to how many times soviet soldiers r*ped her that day. It’s so often brushed aside in history which makes sense seeing how it takes place around the same time as nazi Germany but this and the large amount of forced migration caused by the soviets are just so little talked about. Many American history teachers don’t even talk about these things because it’s a lot easier to explain to a bunch of high schoolers that there is a good side and a bad side in every war and two we fought along side the soviets in ww2. It’s something so little talked about and I think by not talking about we forget how we as humans will often justify commuting a atrocity with another atrocity.

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#48

The US military's actions in the Philippine-American war (also known as the Philippine uprising). After the Spanish-American war the Philippines became a US colony and naturally the locals didn't like the idea of being handed over to another colonial power, especially when they had previously been slated for independence after the war like Cuba. The war lasted from 1899-1905 and the US won with minimal losses against scattered local resistance.

However this was ultimately achieved because the US [took out] upwards of 1.4 million civilians in the Philippines over the course of the war in order to establish control by force and terror. They burned down and massacred entire towns and funnelled thousands upon thousands of people into concentration camps where many more died from disease or being murdered by soldiers in terrible conditions. More Philippine civilians were [unalived] in the war than the US has lost in all its wars combined. Another 1.6 million would be [unalived] by the time the Philippines became independent in 1946.

While not as deadly as the Bengal famine or Belgian Congo, the brutality on display, which was then covered up, ignored, or later "justified", is horrifying.

greg_mca Report

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#49

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About Cannibalism at Ma'arrat al-Nu'man.

In 1098 crusaders occupied the city, massacred 8000 people and then ate their dead bodies.

It is well documented in christian sources because they were not ashamed of what they did.

chsoc , wikimedia.commons Report

#50

The bombing of Dresden in 1945. I mean, you could argue the dark event at play was WW2, but I find this bombing especially dark.

On the evening of the 14th of February 1945, the RAF Bomber Command flew over the city center, dropping 1477 tons of high explosive bombs, and another 1181 tons of incendiary bombs.

The resulting firestorm [unalived] thousands of civilians, to this day nobody knows exactly how many, death tolls range from 20,000 to 25,000.

The witness accounts are what make this especially harrowing.

>!It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mother's hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.!<

>!We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.!<

>!I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.!<

— Lothar Metzger



>!To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire.!<

>!Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen.) They fainted and then burnt to cinders.!<

>!Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: "I don't want to burn to death". I do not know how many people I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.!<

— Margaret Freyer

Over 90% of the city center was destroyed. Air raid shelters were found crammed with burned bodies.

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#51

Not so much an event, but rather, a tool that was used on multiple occasions: early thermal weapons. Most people think of burning oil, but boiling water, hot sands, boiling animal fat, and basically any other liquid that could he heated up to the point of scalding skin. They were primitive, effective, and easy to get, and a mainstay of siege warfare for centuries.

These weapons were not designed to [take out] or be lit on fire. That's Hollywood b******t. No, early thermal weapons were dumped on people merely to disable them by causing incredible pain, not [unalive] them. If they did die, great, but that wasn't the goal.

Heated sand was particularly terrible, as it could get into the gaps in armor and cook your skin directly while heating up your armor, making its removal virtually impossible without inflicting further burns. If you were wearing a suit of armor and got hit full on by a bucket of heated sand, you were in for a very, very long and miserable death.

We like to think our ancestors quaint and naive, but they had a brand of cruel cleverness that has not died out.

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#52

Highland clearances - thousands of Scots were forcibly evicted from their homes, many were forcibly exported to Canada, the US or Australia, many who refused were massacred with whole villages of women & children r*ped, many died of starvation on the forced marches or from famine, all so they could farm sheep.

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#53

The US has a history of abusing Puerto Rico— they put a gag law out on our anthem and flag, massacred a peaceful holiday parade what wasn’t even political in nature (Ponce massacre) They also bombed the town of jayuya, at one point used our women to test a birth control pill (something like 1/3 of them were sterilized), and held the independence leader in a cell where he was subjected to radiation poisoning.

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#54

DuPont knowingly poisoning the world with “forever chemicals”. Watch the 2019 movie called Dark Waters. F****d up.

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#55

The Frank Slide, Alberta Canada. A huge chunk of mountain fell off and covered an entire town. [taking out] everyone but a baby and a cat apparently.

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#56

The Hillsborough Disaster in the UK. During the FA Cup final in 1989, the police opened up too many entrances and negated crowd control. Basically the masses of people started pushing forwards and people started to get crushed alive pressed against the barriers to the football pitch. About 100 people died, around 800 injured, a real tragedy and example of the incompetence of law enforcement, thats barely talked about.

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#57

In the early 80's, Bayer knowingly sold millions of dollars worth of HIV and hepatitis tainted medications to Asia and Latin America. These countries didn't have laws to prevent the proliferation of tainted drugs. Thousands of people died as a result.

It was hardly mentioned on any news platforms.

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#58

This may be hard for some people to read but you can fact check.
The mass exodus/Genocide of Kashmiri Hindus from Kashmir in India.
One fine night in Jan 1990, all the mosques in Kashmir announced that all Hindus need to either flee to other parts of India, die or convert to Islam. If you had to flee you had to leave your women and girls behind.
The next morning, those who did not flee and did not convert were ruthlessly [unalived], their women r*ped, their houses burnt.
The most astonishing fact was that there were radicals too but a lot of them were the same people who these Kashmiri Hindus grew up with, played with, were friends with.
This is not publicised because our “Pseudo-Liberal” historians don’t want most of us to know.
Hindus in Kashmir has reduced from 600,000 to a mere 2,000.

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#59

The Barbary Slave Trade isn't a well known even though it lasted for around 200 years.

"Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli alone enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast)."

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#60

The Hangang Bridge Bombing during the Korean War.
The South Korean Army decided to destroy the bridge in Seoul to stop the North Korean Army's advance, but they didn't let civilians know they were going to detonate. Thousands of South Korean civilians were on the bridge fleeing Seoul at the time, and an unknown number of people were [unalived] when the bridge was destroyed. The South Korean government claims that less than 1,000 civilians died, but it seems unlikely that the true number was that low.

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#61

The first Bloody Sunday in Ireland. 20th November 1920. British troops marched into a Dublin - Tipperary match and opened fire on the crowd and the players. 14 [unalived], including 2 children, and 2 wounded. Britain does it’s best to cover up the attack but it won’t be forgotten.

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#62

I control f'd to see if anyone else posted, apologies if someone has, but the Peshtigo Fire. It was the deadliest wildfire in American history, in a small town in Wisconsin that [unalived] between 1,500 and 2,500 people. It occurred the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, the Great Michigan Fire, and the Port Huron fire (October 8th, 1871; that was a bad day for the Midwest), outshined by the Chicago one, but much deadlier and more devastating. It was so bad, it jumped over a bridge, and burned down both sides of the town, it also made a fire tornado. Many people who tried to escape it by jumping in the river died from hypothermia. There's more info and witness testimony [here](http://www.peshtigofiremuseum.com/fire/). Today, it's a quiet little community, and the lake where so many people died is stunning to look at. My friends and I have visited Peshtigo a few times to pay our respects, at the lake and at the cemetery. There's also a really good restaurant there too. If you're in the Green Bay area, it's only about a 40 minute drive I think, and it's definitely worth checking out.

A few years ago, and I can't find the source now, so not totally sure how true it is, but one of the Michigan towns who helped send lumber to rebuild the town, over logged so much to send wood to help Peshtigo, that their town was eventually overtaken by the sands of Lake Michigan and they became a ghost town.

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#63

The Umfakaan, (The cleansing!), when the Zulu tribe of South Africa adopted a policy of ‘Join us or die’ in the early 1800’s. Entire tribes were massacred by Shaka’s Impi, (Warriors). Millions died or were displaced during the height of the Zulu empire

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#64

On a gulag in an island in the heart of Siberia during the days of stalin, they had to resort to cannibalism due to the fact that, well, it was in the middle of Siberia, and also it was an island I the middle of a river in the middle of nowhere. Just goes to show why stalin was about as bad as, if not worse than, Hitler.

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#65

Im not sure if this is considered "dark" but I would say the battles of world war 1. World war 1 often gets overlooked because it was mostly a stalemate for 4 years that was all an attritional meat grinder and it was not as "flashy" as WW2. Everyone knows the "main characters" of World War 2, could basically name leaders and certain generals without a second thought and probably all the major battles. But world war 1, people often go "ummm idk". The soldiers in world war 1 went through absolute hell. Terrible conditions and terrible strategy. Hundreds of thousands of men lost over a small piece of land that would just get retaken in another month or so. Millions died in world war 1 and most people don't even give them a thought compared to the guys who fought WW2. Also with WW2, everyone forgets that China was a major combatant and lost so many lives fighting the Japanese. The Chinese side of the War is often overlooked unless your chinese basically, which is a shame considering they played a major part in helping defeat the Japanese. I think this gets overlooked due to cold war relations shortly after the War.

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#66

Prior to expansion of technology (telephone/telegraph), and centralized police and law enforcement in rural parts of the US, you could easily make a livable wage as a hired assassin.

It was common for multiple people to sign up and pledge their services to wealthy or powerful in rural areas. Sometimes entire families would provide services on behalf of corrupt politicians, wealthy aspiring industrialists, or regional syndicates associated with factions in larger cities.

Assassins / Mercenaries were used as enforcers in the hollows, bodyguards, or muscle as a show of force whenever they wanted to intimidate the populace. In the days before mobs and the quintessential "mobster" era, gang wars were being waged across the rural parts of the US.

[An ancestor of mine, "Bad Tom" Smith, was a famous hired assassin / mercenary for a wealthy industrialist in southeast Kentucky who came under odds of a fellow local industrialist who gained the backing of the populace in their feud in the late 1800s.]

For example of how devastating this was, officially, just over 20 deaths were attributed to this backwoods feud. The largest city near where all this took place only had a population of 100 people at the time.

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#67

Like most atrocities that happened in American history, the California Genocide was never taught in school. It’s about the [taking out] of native Indians during the gold rush in California. I didn’t learn about it until after college. And Governor Newsome finally made some type of apology maybe last year or the year before.

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#68

The enormous wave of suicides in the final weeks of the Nazi regime in Germany. Thousands upon thousands of Nazi officials and Germans [unalived] themselves and sometimes their entire family out of fear that the Allies would commit atrocities against them. The Wikipedia for this topic estimates that 7,000+ people [unalived] themselves in Berlin alone, while saying this is an under representation when considering the chaos in Germany at the time. I dunno, even though these people sucked, it’s so strange to ponder the idea of thousands upon thousands of your countries leaders all [unaliving] themselves.

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#69

The Native American slave trade. In early stages of colonialism in North America European powers had a very limited presence on the continent and relied on Indian allies for security and trade. A lot of Native American tribes had a system of hostage taking from neighboring groups and they would usually be adopted into the tribe. However, European traders would often trade finished goods and guns in exchange for slaves.

This created a feedback loop where tribes would raid one another for slaves, trade them for guns, and then the tribes without guns would join in to keep up with their rivals in an arms race. This had a huge impact on Native populations alongside disease.

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#70

Not as dark as some other ones on this thread, but I recall learning about a story from WWII:

When the US invaded the island Japanese of Iwo Jima (I’d assume this happened on mainland Japan as well), the Japanese were obviously scared and trying to find any way to fight of the Americans. Some kids were pulled out of school and given clay grenades. The people giving them out would give a child one or two. The obvious purpose was to [take out] the invading Americans. However, when the kids were given two grenades they were told, “Take one and use it to [unalive] an American. Take the other and use it to [unalive] yourself”. Not to mention, these grenades were made out of clay so some kids may have even died without doing anything with the grenades.

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#71

Everyone thinks of Chernobyl when they think of major industrial disasters in the modern era, but the disaster at was two years prior to Chernobyl and much, much worse. Many times worse.

If you want to go into a deep dive on how this happened, Well, There's your Problem has an [excellent two-part podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCKVreNqMjI) on the engineering failures behind it and the true extent of the aftermath.

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#72

Mountain Meadows Massacre. In September of 1857 a group of Paiutes and Mormons dressed as Paiutes raided the Baker-Fancher party traveling through Utah to California. The people in the wagon train figured out the Mormons involvement. The Mormons and US were on the brink of war with each other. Fearing that word of their involvement would get back to the US Army, the Mormons massacred the party (100-200 people in the party). They auctioned off the goods and took in the 17 surviving young children.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-aftermath-of-mountain-meadows-110735627/

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#73

Have you heard of Tarrare? He was born with a stupidly rare eating disorder and basically ate everything he found get his hands on including a cadaver and finally hit rock bottom when he ate a baby whole...

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#74

Mk Ultra experiments. CIA in the 1950’s ran large scale experiments on its own people trying to achieve mind control over them. They tried many methods, including electroshock therapy, but primarily focused on psychedelic drugs. One of the people they experimented on likely went on to become the UNABomber.

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#75

The use of honey as a death sentence, used in the middle ages.
They would cover you with honey and wait for the insects to [take you out] while you're tied up. Takes up to weeks for the person to die.

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#76

The Colfax Courthouse Massacre, basically the 1872 Governor's election in Louisiana was contested. Mainly because white, ex-confederates were beating black people up at the polls. The two sides both declared victory and both parties began installing their office holders across the state. In Colfax, LA both parties brought in their own sheriffs and judges. The Democrats had allied themselves with ex-Confederates and the Republicans had installed a federal militia mostly made up of black ex-Union soldiers.

Long story short the outnumbered black population of Colfax took refuge in the courthouse. The white mob, full of ex-Confederates laid siege to the courthouse. The "Battle of Colfax" lasted most of the afternoon with the Confederates victorious. They set fire to the courthouse to flush the black people inside out. They rounded them up and executed about 150 of them.

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#77

Bangladesh 1971 Genocide by Pakistan during the independence war, Up to 3 million people were [unalived]. Majority Pakistanis say only 26,000 people were [unalived] or outright deny it.

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#78

The British did the same to the South African Boere in the second boer war as the Germans did to the Jews.

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#79

Muslim invasions in the Indian subcontinent [unalived] an estimated 600 million Hindus from ~700 AD till the fall of the Moghal dynasty in the 18th century.

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#80

**Srebrenica massacre**

Slaying of more than 7,000 Bošnjak (Bosnian Muslim) boys and men, perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, in July 1995. In addition to the [unalivings], more than 20,000 civilians were expelled from the area—a process known as ethnic cleansing. The massacre, which was the worst episode of mass murder within Europe since WW2, helped galvanize the West to press for a cease-fire that ended three years of warfare on Bosnia’s territory. However, it left deep emotional scars on survivors and created enduring obstacles to political reconciliation among Bosnia’s ethnic groups.

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#81

The expulsion of the Germans from basically everywhere not-Germany after WWII.


Estimates range from about 500,000-2,500,000 people were [unalived] as a result, and much, much more who were expulsed from their homes.


It tends to be a very touchy subject because it sounds like you're defending Germany when you bring the subject up. I always just think of it as an extension of the Holocaust and put the blame squarely on the German government, even if it was the surrounding nations that did this after the war.


My mother's family were Silesian refugees from the expulsion, my grandmother had some absolute horror stories about what went on.

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#82

A bit of local history from my hometown. I lived in central Minnesota, in an area that used to have a high population of Native Americans, and an area that really doesn’t have any historical significance. I found records from about 100 years ago detailing the conflicts the townspeople had with the Dakota in the area.

There were countless stories that I can’t remember, but this one story sticks out in particular to me. There were these 2 brothers that lived in this little pre-town at the time. One brother was supposedly [unalived] by the Dakota during one of their night raids. The records stated that no one knew for sure what happened to his brother. However, all of a sudden the brother who was still alive would start to disappear every night. He would come back later with tally marks on the stock of his gun. This record ended with it saying that no one ever asked him about those marks and he never talked about it, but by the time he was done there were 20+ marks on his gun. (I apologize for the lack of detail as it has been years since I’ve seen these records)

I remember reading this with my mom when I was like 10 years old and it sent chills up my spine. How could this have happened on the same land that my family has called home for the last 50 years? Really hit home for me, literally and figuratively.

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#83

The Tet Offensive. This was during the Vietnam war. If I remember correctly from high school history class, the USA went from village to village, and they claimed the lives of many, many innocent women & children by essentially lining them up and executing them one by one.

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#84

During WW2 the Japanese actually invaded the tip of Alaska. Very few people new about because the government kept it secret to keep people from panicing, it's actually a pretty interesting story

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#85

Derby's dose. Slave owners and overseers were so deprived this was deemed an acceptable punishment. When you think about it they couldn't use death as a means of torture as that would cost them money, so they improvised.

And the UK only finished paying the compensation to the slave owners in 2015 for taking the slaves and freeing them. That's right everyone, if you were paying UK tax before 2015 you were still paying off the slave owners!

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#86

People Are Sharing 35 'Dark Events' From History You May Not Have Known About People may know about the Great Depression, but not many people know that it was so bad for certain people that they had no choice but to sell their own children. I could have never imagined that happening in the United States of America.

Another note: two UCLA Anderson School of Business professors published a paper claiming that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic policies—notably the New Deal—were so bad, they extended the Great Depression by 7 years. [https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/professors-big-intellectual-risk-grabs-eyeballs-years-later](https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/professors-big-intellectual-risk-grabs-eyeballs-years-later)

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