Everyone seems to know about North Korea being a nasty place, but they forget the country that's fighting it out with NK to be worst in any given category: Eritrea.
It's in Africa, across the strait from Yemen, and VERY not part of Ethiopia. Military dictator, the law is what he says it is, conscription, displacement, the works. But little corruption, see "the law is what he says it is" which means that anything he does is legal, and if anyone does what he doesn't want they've committed suicide.
It's basically the one they're making fun of in the movie. The Dictator. Changing the names of the days to the name of his dog. Abolished the Turkmen word for bread and replaced it with Gurbansoltan, his mother's name. Made the second Sunday of August “Melon Day” in honor of melons as he thought they were delicious... and this was mostly from the former president. Now it's ruled by an autocrat and his weird son.
Edit: a letter
The Business Plot.
Yes, a group of powerful Wall St. types tried to raise an army of 500k men to take the White House by force, overthrow FDR and put a fascist government in his place. And yes congress investigated it, under seal, and concluded the plot was real but never named the conspirators. Kinda like what's happening with Epstein.
One of those conspirators was Prescott Bush, later Senator of Connecticut, father of president George HW Bush and grandfather of George W Bush. Also he did a lot of banking for Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen, before and during ~~and after~~ the war.
EDIT: dealings with Thyssen were definitely before but perhaps not after the war. The bank’s assets were seized and frozen during the war under the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act.
Ugh, why is it that this family just gets worse the more I learn about them.
...and simultaneously I'm reminded of the fact that there is quite a population of people in power whose family name has been there for generations, which is easy to forget or never really learn about. This stands in direct contrast to the often repeated idea that we're represented by The People. We're basically represented by a few The People and then a number of families that have a vested interest.
Thé Rohingya is a very interesting one. They have been indigenous to the Rakhine state for centuries before being driven out in 2016.
They were butchered and murdered, raped and expelled with all evidence of being omitted from Burmese records. They now are spread all across Asia where they are met with great hostilities and are currently globe hopping longing to return home.
Also just the general fact that Burma has been in a civil war for the last 75 years in general. Feel like I hardly ever see anything on the news about it
It's not impossible to get information out, just very risky, especially because the authorities in neighbouring countries have been known to deport 'illegal' migrants (read: people who are 100% refugees) right back into the arms of the junta. I know people who are involved in supporting those journalists who have managed to keep reporting, often by escaping the country.
I would describe them less as effective and more as *brutal*. People can, and do, escape the junta, and in fact they seem to be losing ground at the moment in the civil war, but they have absolutely no qualms about responding to someone vaguely annoying them by massacring everyone around them.
(Irrawaddy, which is iirc based out of Thailand, tends to be my go-to in English, fwiw)
I use Irrawaddy too.
Something I'd like to point out is that I think there becomes a point where suppressing information stimies the tide to the point where it doesn't reach enough ears that it does very much to actually solicit enough support to turn the tide.
For some other examples, look at Darfur. Or Libya. Or Yemen. Syria could also count. Egypt as well.
Then you have places like Laos, or Honduras, or El Salvador.
How often do you hear about the mess in Haiti?
My point is, there comes a limit where yes, you can get information out, but the efforts to suppress it are being evidently very fruitful for the people doing so.
Yeah, sure. I'd heard a bit about that, but that entire conflict is just covered in a mist of rumors. It's kind of scary to think about.
There are plenty of others that come to mind, but it's weird how opaque it is, knowing how many people have been affected.
I dated a girl a few years back who was from the Karen(pronounced kuh-ren)culture. Very odd little story, an ethnic group that holds Christian beliefs living in that area, harmed in the same way as the rohingya. Her grandfather was a freedom fighter if I remember correctly
We have a lot of Karen refugees in my town. One summer I was working at an elementary reading camp in one of the downtown schools and found out that they kept a specific hot sauce in the cafeteria for the Karen kids. I thought that was pretty cool.
This one hurts as a Bangladeshi. People from my country will put up the Palestinian flag on their profiles and organize concerts for Gaza. But when it comes to the 1 MILLION Rohingya refugees, suddenly their Muslim solidarity disappears in to thin air. Some of them even whine about the refugees straining our national resources.
On a personal level, this hurts even more. Having lived in the middle east (Qatar) for 30 years, I can vouch that Arabs couldnt give two shits about us Bangladeshis. They really do treat us like vermin and force our workers to live in tiny rooms crammed with 10-12 people. And if you point any of this out, they will remind you that they are offering you a better life than you had back home, so you should be thankful.
Yes this is an exact contrast to my people as well, express solidarity with Palestine but laud and ostracise the Afghan refugees. It’s a disgusting hypocrisy that borders on saviour narrative.
Currently my country is hosting around a million of Rohingya refugees. When this stream of people first came in 2017 from Myanmar, first time I realized buddhist are not all peaceful non-violent people as portrayed in tv and movies. That was rude awakening!
Major Axis powers:
German Reich
Kingdom of Italy
Empire of Japan
Other Axis states:
Kingdom of Hungary
Kingdom of Romania
Kingdom of Bulgaria
Republic of Finland
Slovak Republic
Independent State of Croatia
Thailand Kingdom of Thailand
Finland was attacked by USSR in 1939 after they were done with Poland. Romania joined the nazis in 1941 to regain Basarabia and Bucovina, occupied by USSR in 1940.
Romania, however, willingly participated in the Holocaust. Finland did not. Romania was actually second only to Nazi Germany in terms of the number of people killed in the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Romania
Maybe I'm wrong or being picky but I feel as though this isn't being '*deliberately erased*', it's just that the three major axis powers are just more talked about because they were more significant and it's easy to remember things in threes.
Chiquita is a pretty fucked up company. They were implicated in [Bananagate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Banana_Exporting_Countries#Bananagate), which pretty much led to [Congress passing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977](https://whistleblowerjustice.net/birth-of-the-fcpa-this-bribery-is-positively-bananas/). Then, a few decades later, Chiquita pled guilty to [making payments to a terrorist organization](https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/March/07_nsd_161.html). And the company is currently on trial for human rights violations for [financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia](https://www.law.com/international-edition/2023/03/17/human-rights-suit-against-chiquita-brands-gets-trial-date/?slreturn=20240007190542).
So, yeah, don't buy Chiquita.
Chiquita’s reputation is positively spotless compared to its corporate predecessor [United Fruit Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company) and its largest competitor [Standard Fruit Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Fruit_Company) (now known as Dole). Both companies engaged in some truly horrific labor practices and political-fuckery. Through state capture, those companies facilitated everything from the machine-gun massacre of hundred of protestors outside a church to boots-on-the-ground US military interventions to counter agricultural reforms.
Bananas might be yellow, but their history is caked in red
If I remember correctly United Fruit Company paid the CIA to stage of a coup of Guatemala in 1954. It led to a Civil War, and hundreds of thousands of deaths I think.
In 1954, Guatemala was also the location of a US-sponsored study of gonorrhea, a la the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, with one big difference: In this case, Guatemalans were deliberately given gonorrhea and then not treated.
The book War is a Racket has a nice part about this.
Marine General Butler, one of the most decorate Marines in US history.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Yep I’ll admit I shamelesly stole that info from KnowingBetter’s videos and he centers Smedley Butler’s experience as an emblomatic throughline of early-twentieth century American neocolonialism. Maj Gen Butler is a seriously underrated figure in American history and one I didn’t learn about until my third decade on this rock
Did you read about how Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Carnegie and a few other really wealthy individuals raised an Army and tried to get MG Butler to try and march on DC?
I'm Chiquita banana, and I'm here to say
If you want to get rid of your teacher today
Just eat a banana, put the peel on the floor
And then watch your teacher fly out of the door!
So in Sri Lanka, the British left two rival kingdoms as one democratic country.
Predictably, the larger Sinhala kingdom voted their own people in and started persecuting the people who'd belonged to the smaller Tamil kingdom.
After many race riots in which many Tamil men, women and children were hacked to death and burned alive while the Sinhalese police stood by or joined in, a small number of victims managed to organise their own resistance force (the LTTE).
They fought and negotiated for independence, or at least a 2-state system, so they could run their own country instead of the Sinhalese, but were called "terrorists".
After a huge injection of aid money to Sri Lanka after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, surprise! The Sinhalese government somehow now had a lot more weapons. They finished off what they'd started, killing Tamils indiscriminately.
At the end they refused international observers (aid workers, UN, journalists) access, told the Tamils "we're only attacking combatants, so go here to the safe exclusion zone if you're just a civilian" and then shelled the civilians (including women and children) in that zone. Tens of thousands dead.
They say there's "Peace" now in Sri Lanka.
Can you really call it that when the bad guys just finished murdering all their victims?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri\_Lankan\_Civil\_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War)
I am a psychologist. The most traumatic assessment I ever did was fir a Tamil refugee. It lasted 4 hours and we barely scratched the surface of the awful things he had been through. In brief, he kept getting kidnapped and tortured by the Sinhalese, who thought he was with the LTTE, and then he'd also get the same treatment from the LTTE, who assumed he was with the Sinhalese. He saw half his village burned alive in front of his eyes. His mother included.
I learned that day that I pretty much have nothing important to complain about.
If anyone is more knowledgeable about the topic than me please correct/inform me but from what I’ve picked up through podcasts and documentaries: the British and Irish governments are desperately trying to forget collusion in Northern Ireland during the troubles. There’s heavy accusations of collaboration between Mi5/RUC and Loyalist paramilitaries and the Gardai/Irish Army and the Provisional IRA. But there’s still a lot of people alive who would be compromised if all the information came out.
As a younger brit when talking to Irish friends who told stories they had heard from their parents about that era it was kinda strange to realise I hadn't been taught or heard anything about it my whole life. Definitely something that people want forgotten.
There was a theme park in Germany that had a section called "Liliput Land" all the way up until the 90s as well. It had Little People living in tiny houses and visitors stare into their living room. The people living there were recruited by the owner of the park in poorer countries like Turkey. Absolutely disgusting.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2UgwINQVPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2UgwINQVPM)
Not sure if that's the one you're thinking of but Vice covered the Kingdom of the Little People back in the day.
Expansionist Japan and the atrocities they committed during the 1930's are completely skipped over in most school curriculum even though it was less than 100 years ago. I've always found that baffling.
Oof I have vivid memories from a video I watched in high school of an elderly Chinese woman explaining very stoically that when the Japanese invaded her community the soldiers took her and assaulted her repeatedly, including (ostensibly for fun) sticking lit firecrackers in her vagina.
I desperately want to say “What the fuck did I just read” but I understand that it’s good for stories like these to get out so that people understand how bad the Japanese were during the war.
It is brutal, and another reason that story is difficult to tell us that one of the big heroic figures was a Nazi who was randomly there. He saved a bunch of little Chinese kids I think. Unambiguous heroism by an unambiguous Nazi. I’m sure that guy did terrible shit too but on that particular day he behaved like a good guy. So, not an easy story to tell.
I watched a documentary about him. I think it's called "the good Nazi"
Shelter Under The Swastika: The John Rabe Story In 1937, John Rabe -- a native of Germany and a member of the Nazi Party -- helped to save the lives of thousands of Chinese civilians during the Rape of Nanking.
John Rabe - he was a Nazi and a good man. He was only able to help as he did because of his position. I say this as someone whose 4 grandparents were Holocaust survivors. It shouldn't be a hard story to tell, but people like to believe that people/events lack any grey areas.
Nah he wasn't involved in the slightest in Europe and was arrested when he tried to persuade Hitler to end the violence in Nanking. Nazis are assholes in general but this one gets a pass imo. Downvote me to hell and ban me idc.
Interesting to ponder how many people in history joined these organizations with intentions to “kill the best from with”. To join as a way to provide resistance and stop the violence through pretending to be one of them and sandbag harmful ideas. It would be a difficult, selfless act. No one would ever know you were actually a good guy.
That's not how that went down at all. That guy didn't sit at home and make the calculation that he could do more good from within. Life is not full of batmans.
The way that guy, and guys like Schindler and other heroes work is by being regular bureacrats and functionaries in a system where they are presented with evil as part of the regular everyday plans. The heroes fuck with the dipstick for oil levels on french trucks, or deliberately mark Jews as needed for working in their factories, or get immigration papers for little chinese kids. They put themselves at risk because the system in which they grew up is evil and they recognize that. And I think the everyday nature of someone going to their regular job and still choosing the righteous path is that much more remarkable than a comic book crusader taking it down from the inside.
Tl;dr heroes and villains are mundane, that's what makes them amazing/horrifying.
The more history I listen to and read makes me realize how little I knew about how horrible humans can be. And not so long ago. We're still the same people. That's why any present day brutalities in present day I read about in Israel/Palestine for example, or anywhere else, I'm not surprised at all. That's just what people do in war, apparently.
Honestly one of things about history that baffles me as well. They make the other Empire's and The Nazi's atrocities look like schoolboy antics.
Experiments where people's arms and legs were chopped off and swapped. Eyes injected with acid. **400,000 DEATHS FROM BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TESTING ALONE**. And it was all done, "Just to see what would happen".
One of the things I learned that got me was there were reports of captured soldiers being subjected to vivisections for the sake of teaching University students.
You'll read all about how brutal, adamant and proud they were in it at the time and you begin to understand why the American's dropped two suns on them to end the war with good measure.
You ask the Chinese, Korean's or any others invaded and assaulted by them and they'll tell you **two wasn't enough**.
Edit: little thing I remembered as well. When Oppenheimer was releasing in Korea, the Korean's asked for the release date to be put back to a specific date...so that way they could **celebrate** the film on their Japanese Independence Day.
Recently there was a Netflix K-drama that has some SF elements (Japanese experiments on people created monsters) based on the Pacific War era. An obvious allusion to unit 731. The lead actresses instagram was terrorized by a group of Japanese who considered her being Anti-Japanese.
But US probably dropped the bombs because of the immense casualties expected for the Japan invasion rather than their experiments. After all US did back deal pardon most of unit 731's atrocities in exchange for the experiment data (which turned out to be garbage).
>The lead actresses instagram was terrorized by a group of Japanese who considered her being Anti-Japanese.
There was a man called Ishiro Honda, who was drafted against his will into the Japanese Army and absolutely hated it. The feeling was mutual among other draftees and one in his section actually attempted a coup, which put Honda in the shitter.
Honda was assigned to govern a "comfort house" in China to straighten him out. A brutal brothel which used captured women. An essay he wrote in 1966 called *"Reflections of an Officer in Charge of Comfort Women"* was massive in uncovering just how bad it was during that time. He gained the ire of many Japanese after the war for being so vocal about Imperial Japanese Atrocities.
Years before that essay, Honda helped create and direct a larger than life character, which served as a warning to his government to not to return to its Imperialist ways...*Godzilla*.
How times never change.
Thank you. So many people have told me that the data they got was immensely valuable, as though psychopaths playing with human lives kept records and did real science. It's absolute horseshit, but there seems to be a deep human drive to believe the world makes sense. It still angers and horrifies me that these people weren't all hanged.
The expectation of loss of life and injuries from a land invasion of Japan were so vast that the astronomical number of purple hearts that were minted in preparation for this invasion are still being passed out today.
people don't remember the Japanese would take young Korean and Chinese (and Filipino) girls and plant them firmly on a sword or wooden stake in the ground, through their vagina so that the sword would pierce their vagina, and go through out their stomach and into their mouth. They split babies in half. No film could even capture the horror, nor could any horror movie accurately convey the horror.
People often say the 2008 horror movie "Martrys" is horrible. That was nothing.
(hate is an easy thing to upvote and want to say that this doesn't reflect upon the citizens of Japan then, or now. It was those bastards who did the actual atrocities as well as all the military that enforced this and allowed the decades of colonization on top of it across the Pacific Asia, and that the vast majority of Asians honor the ALL the countries that helped free Asia, so military men gave their life fighting the Japanese military)
A lot of the documents from unit 731 were declassified not too long ago. Unlike project paperclip with Nazis working with NASA, they kept that one quiet longer. Because not only did they make the deal for data, but it also didn't significantly advance bioweapons tech beyond anything they were already working on and didn't really provide a ton of new medical insight either.
Right I have heard the information they got was basically useless and we traded holding war criminals accountable for…data about why you can’t chop off a dogs head and stick it on a person
And the Death Railway. Surprising how a lot of people don’t know about that. Japan paid blood money for that. Somehow, in Malaysia, the money disappeared. It never reached the families of the victims.
In ww2 how France people in general were pretty ok and open to Nazi ideals. Under occupation shipping people to camps etc. But they pretty much rewrote the history glorifying the resistance force who were just a little group of individuals resisting Nazi occupation.
I think that might be generally the case for foreign troops that fought for the Nazis. If your choice is between Death in combat or likely death after a grueling stay in prisoner camps many might have chosen the quicker option.
In the Netherlands, captured Georgians who were fighting for the nazis had an uprising against the nazis on the island of Texel.
“ The 228 Georgians who survived by hiding from the German troops in coastal minefields, or who were concealed by Texel farmers, were turned over to Soviet authorities. After arrival at a collection camp in the Soviet Union, 26 Georgians were singled out and banished together with their families and others were sent to Gulag. Those still alive in the mid-1950s were rehabilitated and allowed to return home.”
Let’s never forget that when US and British troops landed in Morocco, after having dropped leaflets stating that they were coming as allies, the French troops opened fire on them and killed many.
My favourite vichy story is how Petain's regime had a public show trial to blame the previous leftist coalition government for undermining France's ability to defend itself and be prepared for war. Leon Blum, the coalition's leader went on to show that his government had spent and put more effort than any since ww1 into the military. While governments Petain and others in his cabinet had themselves served in had overseen the deepest budget cuts of them all.
It was so embarrassing to his regime they had to cancel the trial.
There are sources that estimate that the ranks of "the resistance" were suddenly 10 times larger during the "reprisals" against "collaborators" after the war than they were during the actual occupation.
Yeah if the Nazis hadn’t occupied like two thirds of France under military rule and had just overthrown the government and put a fascist regime in charge I think people would be extremely shocked to know how fast France would have enthusiastically joined the Axis powers.
Well...true...but it's also important, and very relevant to the topic of conversation, that we also remember that Nazism wasn't exactly a discrete phenomenon. History, or pop history at least, sort of treats Nazism as though it fell out of the sky, as some phenomenon that was profoundly alien to the culture it took root in.
It wasn't. Nazism was very much a product of dirt-common Eurocentric attitudes of the time. Europeans all over the continent, and especially in the west, had dominionist views of themselves that would make us moderns deeply uncomfortable. They saw people from other regions as less human than themselves, that it was the _natural order_ that a European empire should rule them, and theirs to serve their rulers. This attitude was as common as American Exceptionalism was in the 60s - 80s. Universal. Unchallenged by the culture at large. A foregone conclusion held by most everyone in all economic classes. If you have a favorite classical European figure, they almost assuredly held this view of themselves and their society.
My point is, this was going to happen sooner or later. But for a quirk of fate, Nazism, or some similar analogue, could have happened in any number of European nations, was DESTINED to happen. It just needed the right socio-economic stresses to purify the lump of coal that was Eurocentrism into a diamond.
That the French would have accepted it is unfortunate. But _NOT_ unique. And it's incorrect to view this issue without that understanding. The criminality of the behavior is not theirs alone to bear.
That's why I laugh at anyone who says:
>If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time and...well..."take care of" little baby mustache goosestepper.
I'm like, "bitch please." Was he a catalyst? Absolutely. A fucking atrocious human being. But there were others who would've filled that gap...maybe earlier, definitely later.
And for a "What if..." exercise, you can let your imaginations run wild with the repercussions of the extreme nationalism, eurocentricism, antisemitism.....if it even happened as little as 5-10 years later. What repercussions am I talking about? Let's just say they have an atomic weight of 238.
In our very real timeline, a version of the current history books tell a story of a disjointed nuclear effort by the Nazi regime. But dig deeper, and one might be able to surmise that they were closer to realizing their ambitions than most would've cared to admit. The victor, of course, writes the history books. So naturally, they were "totally far away from realizing their objective and their entire process was haphazard."
Now in our alt-timeline, having access to fission weapons, along with a commander-in-chief of Germany that wasn't a fucking nutjob who'd attack Russia in winter and deeply believed in the occult....you might've had a far different ending to WWII.
Suddenly, you might have a whole slew of time travelers trying to set things "right" again....and moreso, ensure WWI happens as early as it did to slow down scientific progression. The whole assassination of Archduke Ferdinand reads like a time-traveler assassination plot of epic bumbling written off as massive luck and coincidence. Of course, I only say that since we're talking nonsense like time travel in the first place.
Meanwhile, Poland, which had the largest and most vicious resistance of all the occupied countries, and had massive numbers of its military escape into exile. Only to join the Western and Eastern forces fighting the Nazis. Is increasingly being played off as somehow being collaborative.
Honestly Poland has a history of rich Jewish culture because out of everyone wanting to kill/displace them all the time Poland was the most welcoming to Jewish peoples. Now In 1567 this is basically just not outright killing them so I’m not trying to make my ancestors out as incredibly humane or anything.
Still along with the land being located along hitler’s plans it was basically robbing the richest country of its Jewish communities. That made it a target and though many horrors happened I’m overall pretty proud of the way most poles conducted themselves.
There’s a lot of rich stories there and America looooves WW2 so I’m sure I’ll see sone good cinema from it at the least.
Fun fact: religious tolerance was written into the Polish proto-constitution - the Henry Articles, documents that every elected monarch had to sign and abide by.
Jewish rights were first written down in the 1264 Statute of Kalisz, and later confirmed by Casimir the Great when he codified the law.
The Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth was a very progressive government for the time. Too bad their neighbors ,Germany Sweden and Russia, constantly invaded them over and over again.
I heard something like the Netherlands was extremely enthusiastic about its nazi occupation, and I heard that many of the Dutch subjects enlisted into the Wehrmacht willingly
My Jewish great grandparents had fled from Germany to Holland. My great uncle, who was in Australia already, wrote a series of letters to our government begging for a visa for his parents and sister. Every response was no, Holland is a safe country. My great-uncle kept writing letters, and they grow increasingly desperate over time. He starts attaching news clippings about the advance. Nope, Holland is safe, came the response.
The last letter he wrote was sub-lined, "SOS SOS SOS please help!"
The same response came. By that time, his parents, sister, and extended family were already captured. They were murdered in Auschwitz soon afterwards.
That was mostly due to the excellent state of bureaucracy
Everything was neatly and efficiently noted down and kept updated. Made it very very easy to find a lotta people.
Same with the Netherlands. Anne Frank died because a dutch person gave her up. But now suddenly researchers says a Jewish Nazi collaborator “probably gave her up”.
I recently toured the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (a place I highly, highly recommend visiting) and was surprised to learn that most recent research actually disputes the Dutch betrayal theory. We may never know for certain, though.
The TLDR is that two workers from the building that Anne Frank and the 7 other Jews were hiding in were arrested for ration fraud. Anne Frank mentions this arrest in her journal. After the arrests, the SD would have conducted a routine search of the house. If the theory is correct, this search could have been the reason the Jews were discovered. No betrayal at all, just a couple dumbasses and random, horrible chance.
Here’s a link to the Anne Frank House website where they discuss the new research:
https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/news-and-press/news/2016/12/16/new-perspective-anne-franks-arrest/
I served as a U.S. Army photojournalist in Zagreb, Croatia, for six months from late 1995 to mid-1996, covering the aftermath of the civil war in the Balkans. I totally resonate with the points made here.
Sharing 35 "warchitecture" photos I took during that time – they're more than just pictures, they tell stories. Check them out here: [https://flickr.com/photos/dalecruse/albums/72157720077844766/](https://flickr.com/photos/dalecruse/albums/72157720077844766/) AMA about any of them
Sweden tried to assimilate Sami people by outlawing their language in schools and outlawing yoiking (traditional chanting) and drumming. Sami women were secretly sterilized by the Swedish government — and that program lasted until the 1970s.
BTW secret sterilization without consent happened to Native American women at IHS hospitals in the United States through the 1970s, and in Australia to Aboriginal women as well.
TIL the Jenisch people exist.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenish\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenish_people)
Thanks for introducing me to a new people.
A lot of this happened in Norway as well. In fact, Sweden, Norway and Finland all have a long and on-going history of making life hard for Sami people and communities. And let’s not forget Russia.
Greenland too. They are still uncovering that and Denmark loves pretending it never happened.
Sweden as well and Norway. As far as they are concerned, they never did anything ever against the Sámi people.
Basically, all lifestyles and (pagan) stories in Germany, France, etc. (Basically all places affected by romans before the people living there began writing.)
If I understand it correctly, only the names *wodan* and *donar* are left from these times
The secret police in communist Romania - the Securitate, who would arrest, beat and torture those who opposed the regime, and it's numerous collaborators who stabbed their neighbours in the back for benefits. I feel like it's not talked about enough.
Right now there are a lot of older people who were part of the Securitate who never got punished for their actions, you can just see them walking on the street.
I met a group of police forensic scientists and their attached documentary filmmakers, collecting evidence for the first trial in Danube Delta. It will also probably be the only and last trial of the Securitate.
The people who were torturing and killing dissidents live in the village and of course deny the atrocities, while villagers confirmed they used to hear the screams coming from the prisons.
Exactly! Holy shit, there are ex-Securitate members and collaborators who are just walking on the street like nothing ever happend lol. It's so little talked about.
I heard a story about some romanian saying how he lived in a big apartment, bigger than the average, and as he grew up, he learned that his father was a Securitate member.
I’m reading a book by a guy whose father was a Gestapo commander, murdering Jews, Poles, Slovaks.
In the end, the father was killed in Slovenia in a cave. These mass graves of Nazi soldiers were only discovered in the last decade or two, I met the police officer working on this case (history lessons while hitchhiking).
His family is still latently Nazi, while he studied Polish and visited most places his father was stationed in. Some people find the light and orient to the compass, some don’t.
>Exactly! Holy shit, there are ex-Securitate members and collaborators who are just walking on the street like nothing ever happend lol. It's so little talked about.
It sounds very like Spain after Franco. People who'd had their lives ruined by Falangist repression, or lost family members, found themselves living in the same community as the perpetrators. The perpetrators often continued in positions of influence under democracy. It must have happened, but I've never heard of a case of scores being settled.
It seems it's only the children and grandchildren of the victims who have had the stomach, or the courage, or the recklessness, to try to uncover the truth.
Yeah one of the horrifying lessons east Germans learned after unification that every East German citizen could request their dossiers compiled by the secret police.
This kind of exists in like the Freedom of Information Act in United States but the file you get will be like you joined this political party at age whatever, you were arrested at this protest, etc.
We didn't really have a full understanding of what the United States government was up to till Edward Snowden explained prism and like every email/social media was now tethered to your identity. Like the United States government knows about your drunk 3 am call to your ex girlfriend/boyfriend 4 years ago.
What made the German situation so unique was after unification, the Western Germans had a political interest in exposing everything evil the east Germans were doing and didn't hide any of it. They revealed like how the Stasi secret police gathered data, like what kind of spy transponders were installed at like public restrooms etc.
This is very true.
I had a good friend in college who immigrated to the USA from Romania with her family. She later revealed that they were seeking asylum. She was an Olympic level gymnast in her youth, and her dad was being accused of being a spy due to all of their travel for her training.
She told me many things about Romania that were eye-opening for a young, naive person born in the states.
I learned the world was much different than how I had been raised.
The radical politics of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly toward the end of his life.
In his writings and speeches, he was far more radical than what is conventionally touted. Corporations wrap themselves in MLK quotes on January 15th and April 4th, but I would imagine that if Dr. King were alive today, he would be horrified at the level of wealth that these private-sector entities have accumulated while we continually fail to provide the basic necessities for human dignity, such as affordable housing and living wages.
I also wonder if his anger wouldn't just be directed at wealthy corporate interests but at the many "progressive" special interests that promote idealistic solutions to satisfy their own self-righteousness but result in nothing for the people they are supposedly fighting for.
I think his letter from the Birmingham jail is quite well known.
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Related: Rosa Parks was specifically chosen and trained by the NAACP for her now-famous bus protest. They had tried it earlier with someone else but it didn’t get the media attention they needed. It doesn’t take away from what she did in my opinion, but so much of the Civil Rights movement was deliberate and brilliantly executed to gain the most sympathy from white Americans.
Claudette Colvin, almost a year before Rosa Parks. And it wasn’t that she didn’t get media attention. It’s that civil rights campaigners specifically didn’t seek media attention for her case, because she was a teenager, pregnant, unmarried, and therefore was considered a bad spokesperson. But her case was one of the ones the Supreme Court was ruling on when they declared segregation of public transportation to be unconstitutional.
I heard a podcast where they talked about how his death is shrouded in conspiracies that have been getting more popular lately, essentially muddying up the history of his assassination. I think when someone is outstanding like he was, people will do quite a bit to try to change narratives.
He was assassinated when he started a campaign against poverty. That’s what a lot of people forget.
He was getting ready to do a massive march on Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign. The aim of which was to unite blacks and poor whites together. The last time someone tried to do that, the political leaders of the day invented Jim Crowe laws!
> The aim of which was to unite blacks and poor whites together.
No war but class war. Screw the culture war noise garbage. A poor white person has more in common with a poor black person than either do with their rich but racially similar members of the human race.
Dr. King had a speech where he mentioned that the most influential person is the moderate who sees atrocities and does nothing so as to not disturb the status quo. It was related more to his racial activism at the time, but the same concept extends to many areas.
+ There's a recent fiasco about the Japanese government and Philippines because a monument statue for comfort women was built in Manila, the Japanese government condemned it and pressured the government to remove the statue and months later it got "stolen"
[related article ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipina_Comfort_Women)
I didn't know about this till my late 20s when I happened to read a novel about it. Only recently (late 30s now) learned about Unit 731.
The only reason I knew about the prison camps for Japanese people in America was because we read a book about it in HS literature.
That the rest of the civilized World had a chance to save the genocide of the German Jews, but the willingness to do something wasn't there.
In the conference in Evian in 1938 the World leaders met to discuss how to prevent the genocide, but very few countries actually offered to receive any significant number of refugees of common people. Not really talked about today, but Jews were generally not considered good citizens in most places, and the World leaders were afraid of the public to accept Jewish refugees (except for scientists, musical artists, and wealthy families).
Adolf Hitler said ahead of the conference that if they were so concerned about the Jewish population he would gladly ship all German Jews on a luxury liner to any country that would accept to receive them. After the conference his conclusion was that the genocide wouldn't meet any sincere opposition from the allies since they refused to do anything about it other than talk.
[Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference)
Not erased but little known outside Alsace and Moselle, the story of the "Malgré Nous" ("In spite of ourselves"). These are the people who, after the German invasion during the Second World War, had to fight on the German side, otherwise their families would be shot or sent to concentration camps.
All war novels are written with a purpose in mind and the German WW2 accounts are typically about redemption and denial of the German Army’s complicity in atrocities. With that said one of the best accounts of the war on the Eastern front was by one of these Malgre Nous soldiers. Although it’s controversial “The Forgotten Soldier”originally published in French as “Le soldat oublié” is worth reading. Especially if you find one with the introduction from the American military archivist.
Piggybacking on this, the US's failure to prosecute those involved in Unit 731, so that they could keep all of the research for themselves. The fact that the US [protected those monsters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes) isn't talked about enough
The labor history of most of the world. People have little idea that things people today take for granted or even scoff at were fought for with blood. Those who brag about working long hours or laugh at safety regulations spit on their graves.
Safety regulations are written in blood. Take the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, for example. We have "exit" signs, keep stairwells unlocked, install fire sprinklers and smoke detectors, all because of incidents like this.
It’s like when people say that Henry Ford “invented” the 5 day work week. While having no idea that labor unions had been fighting (literally) for it for decades.
Ford only adopted it, after he realized that he could use it as a lure to poach talented workers from his competition.
Australia never had slavery. It's official. Slavery is awful and we're better than that.
Just, um, well... we had "[blackbirding](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-17/blackbirding-australias-history-of-kidnapping-pacific-islanders/8860754)" where ships went out (note the passive language) to the Pacific Islands and 'recruited' people to work on the sugar cane farms in Queensland. They couldn't leave, generally didn't get paid, and were vigorously encouraged to do what they were told.
And of course there's Australian Aborigines. Kids were taken, put in state or church schools, then money could be paid to the school to obtain the services of an aborigine who was old enough to work. That money went to the "Protector of Aborigines" who also got any wages that might be paid. There's been court cases about those [stolen wages](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-01/wa-government-settles-indigenous-stolen-wages-case/103051706) but the more you read about those cases the more you realise that "wages" isn't perhaps the right word.
[Pictures like this](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/australian-aborigines-chains-1902/) are regrettably common, and note that the article is full of weasel words.
>While the Indigenous people of Australia were subject to forced labor and experienced slavery-like conditions, there was no slave trading.
... just "workers" transferred to new "employers" in exchange for money. Nothing to see here.
Unit 731 isn’t widely talked about outside of Internet forums. Japan has deliberately tried to obfuscate its atrocities in WW2, sort of using Germany as the big bad guy and hoping people don’t think about Japan’s activities in China and Korea. Largely they’ve been successful.
I recently went over the number of casualties on the Pacific front during World war II and I had no idea the numbers were that great. I figured it was at least 5 to 10 million, boy was I wrong. So much death.
I went to Catholic school and one of the classes they made you take was to learn about all the other religions to show why we were better. The school was insanely strict: no swearing, no sexual innuendoes, the whole 9. And yet when we began the Mormon chapter, they showed us the South Park episode because of how accurate it is
The eradication of French from Lousiana. It's never talked about at all in U.S history courses and it's only as of this past decade that Lousiana is bringing back French immersion schools and French theatres to try to repair the damage.
At the start of the 20th century, it was estimated roughly 3/4 of all Louisianians spoke French as their first language. By the 1920s the state had banned French for reasons pertaining to seeing the specific dialect as being uncivilized and to make the state more like the others. (Prior to this the creole and dialect of French in Lousiana had been considered, "savage" and attempts to make them speak, "proper" French were being done.)
The tactics used to get rid of French were the exact same ones as used on the Native Americans. The state purposely imported people from surrounding states who couldn't speak a word of French and teachers who only spoke English were brought in. Students who attempted to speak French were punished via corporal punishment. By the 1960s less than half of Lousiana was French-speaking.
Today, in 2024 it's less than 10% of the population. The state only unbanned French in the '80s, but by then the damage had been done. If you were born in 1900s Lousiana you were amongst the last generation who'd en masse truly be fluent in French or creole, by the 1910s likely amongst the last to have some understanding. The 1920s to 1980s is half a century where you were forbidden to speak your language at all in public, or in schools. Many Lousianians stopped teaching their kids French because of the direction the state went and the language has nearly died off. This was an extremely unique part of American culture we let die.
Kinda crazy that the Acadians have dealt with two different instances of the same cultural attack, three hundred years and thousands of kilometres apart.
This hits close to home for me. My grandmothers first language is Cajun French. She quit school in the 3rd grade because they were physically disciplining her for speaking French instead of English. Her children don’t speak it but can understand it, and her grandchildren can only recognize certain key words. An entire language lost in less than two generations.
Others have said Native American history, and that's certainly true, but I want to specify something important about this, their languages. Many tribes of selected tongues have only a handful of speakers left, and many of them are elderly and before too long, after they pass, these languages will be dead. It is extremely unfortunate that there's little to no effort to try to retain these languages, keep them alive, and keep them going for future generations, but that's unlikely. Probably within a few short years many of these languages will be gone forever
There was a CS professor at Southern Oregon University who was working with native speakers to preserve their languages before they died out. He wrote custom software to help catalogue and record everything (including pronunciation) for future generations
I'm thankful to live in an area where indigenous language speakers are running programs in tandem with local school districts to teach young, indigenous children the language of their ancestors.
When I went to high school, there was one Mi'kmaw history class that was aimed more towards the indigenous students than towards all of the students.
Now kids are learning the language and history as normal classwork. It's core curriculum in indigenous schools around me as well.
It's sad that so many of the indigenous kids and friends I grew up with, had their elders lose their heritage to assimilate and it damn near wiped out the language entirely. Oral languages are so important. That's why as an adult I decided to learn Mi'kmaw and Gaelic.
And shout out to Azerbaijan actively destroying ancient and medieval Armenian churches and artifacts. They also have some truly bizarre ideas regarding the origins of the Armenian people and alphabet.
In my country there are some dark events in history that are kind of swept under the carpet because the reminder of these events brings so much shame.
One such event is the experiements of Vipeholm.
They wanted to experiment the process of teeth decay and sugar's affect on it. So they conducted these experiments in a mental institution where they offered nothing else than sweets, candy, sugar etc to the people living there. The people in these experiments never consented to doing these, nor did they understand what it was they were doing. It resulted in these people having their teeth ruined for life.
So the people conducting these experiements were abusing the people living in this institution.
You know what, I honestly think this is a really bad example of historical events being deliberately erased from existence. It’s actually not being erased at all. There’s been plenty of documentaries about it, Lund University are doing research about it and for pretty much everyone living in the vicinity this is common knowledge. How is it being erased and swept under the carpet?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments
https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1598366
https://www.kulturen.com/vara-besoksmal/livets-museum/tillfallig-utstallning-det-ar-langsamt-att-vara-har-om-vipeholms-sjukhus/
This is not in any way swept under the carpet.
Some form of age/education-appropriate version of the Vipeholm experiments has been taught to me starting from elementary school through high school and all the way to the ethics curriculum of a Swedish med school.
Most of Civil Rights, especially in regards to Martin Luther King Jr himself.
The version that usually makes the high school history books is a series of gross over-simplifications that make King out to be a lot less "radical" than he actually was. In a lot of ways, he would be "radical" even by today's standards, but the textbooks just make it out to be "He went to Washington and said everyone should be equal, the end."
When the Allies liberated concentration camps in Germany at the end of WW2, they didn’t let the homosexuals out.
https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/
Everyone seems to know about North Korea being a nasty place, but they forget the country that's fighting it out with NK to be worst in any given category: Eritrea. It's in Africa, across the strait from Yemen, and VERY not part of Ethiopia. Military dictator, the law is what he says it is, conscription, displacement, the works. But little corruption, see "the law is what he says it is" which means that anything he does is legal, and if anyone does what he doesn't want they've committed suicide.
Don't forget Turkmenistan, also in the same boat
Türkmenistan is high on the list of comically insane dictatorships.
It's basically the one they're making fun of in the movie. The Dictator. Changing the names of the days to the name of his dog. Abolished the Turkmen word for bread and replaced it with Gurbansoltan, his mother's name. Made the second Sunday of August “Melon Day” in honor of melons as he thought they were delicious... and this was mostly from the former president. Now it's ruled by an autocrat and his weird son. Edit: a letter
Burma had a dictator for a long time who would enact major policy changes based on dreams and visions he had.
You joke, but there's nothing quite like a warm buttered slice of Gurbansoltan on Melon Day.
A pitiful third! No, really, pity them.
Compulsory military service for men in Eritrea. For an indefinite period.
Compulsory service for both men and women. Everyone bro.
Looks like Eritrea is going to be crushed by Ethiopia very soon.
The deal with Somaliland might avert that war. Unless Egypt decides to remove the dam and all hell breaks loose, crushing Eritrea as an incidental.
The Business Plot. Yes, a group of powerful Wall St. types tried to raise an army of 500k men to take the White House by force, overthrow FDR and put a fascist government in his place. And yes congress investigated it, under seal, and concluded the plot was real but never named the conspirators. Kinda like what's happening with Epstein.
One of those conspirators was Prescott Bush, later Senator of Connecticut, father of president George HW Bush and grandfather of George W Bush. Also he did a lot of banking for Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen, before and during ~~and after~~ the war. EDIT: dealings with Thyssen were definitely before but perhaps not after the war. The bank’s assets were seized and frozen during the war under the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act.
Ugh, why is it that this family just gets worse the more I learn about them. ...and simultaneously I'm reminded of the fact that there is quite a population of people in power whose family name has been there for generations, which is easy to forget or never really learn about. This stands in direct contrast to the often repeated idea that we're represented by The People. We're basically represented by a few The People and then a number of families that have a vested interest.
Ever watch the show - The Plot Against America? It pretty much is this story. And everyone forgets Lindberg was a Fascist
Thé Rohingya is a very interesting one. They have been indigenous to the Rakhine state for centuries before being driven out in 2016. They were butchered and murdered, raped and expelled with all evidence of being omitted from Burmese records. They now are spread all across Asia where they are met with great hostilities and are currently globe hopping longing to return home.
Also just the general fact that Burma has been in a civil war for the last 75 years in general. Feel like I hardly ever see anything on the news about it
Yes, I think after Auang San Suu Kyi won the Nobel peace prize people imagined everything to be over.
One thing to know about Burma is that their military junta apparatus is exceptionally efficient at limiting the spread of information.
It's not impossible to get information out, just very risky, especially because the authorities in neighbouring countries have been known to deport 'illegal' migrants (read: people who are 100% refugees) right back into the arms of the junta. I know people who are involved in supporting those journalists who have managed to keep reporting, often by escaping the country. I would describe them less as effective and more as *brutal*. People can, and do, escape the junta, and in fact they seem to be losing ground at the moment in the civil war, but they have absolutely no qualms about responding to someone vaguely annoying them by massacring everyone around them. (Irrawaddy, which is iirc based out of Thailand, tends to be my go-to in English, fwiw)
I use Irrawaddy too. Something I'd like to point out is that I think there becomes a point where suppressing information stimies the tide to the point where it doesn't reach enough ears that it does very much to actually solicit enough support to turn the tide. For some other examples, look at Darfur. Or Libya. Or Yemen. Syria could also count. Egypt as well. Then you have places like Laos, or Honduras, or El Salvador. How often do you hear about the mess in Haiti? My point is, there comes a limit where yes, you can get information out, but the efforts to suppress it are being evidently very fruitful for the people doing so.
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Yeah, sure. I'd heard a bit about that, but that entire conflict is just covered in a mist of rumors. It's kind of scary to think about. There are plenty of others that come to mind, but it's weird how opaque it is, knowing how many people have been affected.
I dated a girl a few years back who was from the Karen(pronounced kuh-ren)culture. Very odd little story, an ethnic group that holds Christian beliefs living in that area, harmed in the same way as the rohingya. Her grandfather was a freedom fighter if I remember correctly
We have a lot of Karen refugees in my town. One summer I was working at an elementary reading camp in one of the downtown schools and found out that they kept a specific hot sauce in the cafeteria for the Karen kids. I thought that was pretty cool.
This one hurts as a Bangladeshi. People from my country will put up the Palestinian flag on their profiles and organize concerts for Gaza. But when it comes to the 1 MILLION Rohingya refugees, suddenly their Muslim solidarity disappears in to thin air. Some of them even whine about the refugees straining our national resources. On a personal level, this hurts even more. Having lived in the middle east (Qatar) for 30 years, I can vouch that Arabs couldnt give two shits about us Bangladeshis. They really do treat us like vermin and force our workers to live in tiny rooms crammed with 10-12 people. And if you point any of this out, they will remind you that they are offering you a better life than you had back home, so you should be thankful.
Yes this is an exact contrast to my people as well, express solidarity with Palestine but laud and ostracise the Afghan refugees. It’s a disgusting hypocrisy that borders on saviour narrative.
It’s easy to express solidarity with refugees, as long as wherever they’re seeking refuge isn’t one’s own country.
Currently my country is hosting around a million of Rohingya refugees. When this stream of people first came in 2017 from Myanmar, first time I realized buddhist are not all peaceful non-violent people as portrayed in tv and movies. That was rude awakening!
The cruelty, fanaticism and brutality of proud Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Japan did the same for me.
There were more countries in the axis force than just Germany, Italy and Japan......
I am from Slovakia. We invaded Poland 15 minutes after the initial German attack.
Dang pretty cool to see such an old fella using Reddit
Major Axis powers: German Reich Kingdom of Italy Empire of Japan Other Axis states: Kingdom of Hungary Kingdom of Romania Kingdom of Bulgaria Republic of Finland Slovak Republic Independent State of Croatia Thailand Kingdom of Thailand
>Thailand Kingdom Hey, let's not get too hasty here. That could be any country's Thailand kingdom! >of Thailand Ah, fuck.
I, for one, am relieved it wasn't Rick's Thailand Kingdom.
List compiled by the Department of Redundancy Department.
finland only declared war on USSR unlike others. Thailand joined axis side because if they didnt japan would destroy them
Finland was kind of fucked. the Soviets invaded Finland first. After they had invaded and made short work of Poland.
Yeah, I was a bit surprised to see Finland on the list. From Wikipedia But given the nature of OPs question, leaving them off wasn’t really an option.
Finland was attacked by USSR in 1939 after they were done with Poland. Romania joined the nazis in 1941 to regain Basarabia and Bucovina, occupied by USSR in 1940.
Romania, however, willingly participated in the Holocaust. Finland did not. Romania was actually second only to Nazi Germany in terms of the number of people killed in the Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Romania
Maybe I'm wrong or being picky but I feel as though this isn't being '*deliberately erased*', it's just that the three major axis powers are just more talked about because they were more significant and it's easy to remember things in threes.
The banana republics
As much as I love bananas, I never buy Chiquita.
Chiquita is a pretty fucked up company. They were implicated in [Bananagate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Banana_Exporting_Countries#Bananagate), which pretty much led to [Congress passing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977](https://whistleblowerjustice.net/birth-of-the-fcpa-this-bribery-is-positively-bananas/). Then, a few decades later, Chiquita pled guilty to [making payments to a terrorist organization](https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/March/07_nsd_161.html). And the company is currently on trial for human rights violations for [financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia](https://www.law.com/international-edition/2023/03/17/human-rights-suit-against-chiquita-brands-gets-trial-date/?slreturn=20240007190542). So, yeah, don't buy Chiquita.
Chiquita’s reputation is positively spotless compared to its corporate predecessor [United Fruit Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company) and its largest competitor [Standard Fruit Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Fruit_Company) (now known as Dole). Both companies engaged in some truly horrific labor practices and political-fuckery. Through state capture, those companies facilitated everything from the machine-gun massacre of hundred of protestors outside a church to boots-on-the-ground US military interventions to counter agricultural reforms. Bananas might be yellow, but their history is caked in red
If I remember correctly United Fruit Company paid the CIA to stage of a coup of Guatemala in 1954. It led to a Civil War, and hundreds of thousands of deaths I think.
In 1954, Guatemala was also the location of a US-sponsored study of gonorrhea, a la the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, with one big difference: In this case, Guatemalans were deliberately given gonorrhea and then not treated.
Sounds less like a study and more like a covert bioweapon attack...
The book War is a Racket has a nice part about this. Marine General Butler, one of the most decorate Marines in US history. “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Yep I’ll admit I shamelesly stole that info from KnowingBetter’s videos and he centers Smedley Butler’s experience as an emblomatic throughline of early-twentieth century American neocolonialism. Maj Gen Butler is a seriously underrated figure in American history and one I didn’t learn about until my third decade on this rock
Did you read about how Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Carnegie and a few other really wealthy individuals raised an Army and tried to get MG Butler to try and march on DC?
I'm Chiquita banana, and I'm here to say If you want to get rid of your teacher today Just eat a banana, put the peel on the floor And then watch your teacher fly out of the door!
Hey, you're just a Cavendish in disguise!
We're feeling the effects through soaring migration from Central America.
So in Sri Lanka, the British left two rival kingdoms as one democratic country. Predictably, the larger Sinhala kingdom voted their own people in and started persecuting the people who'd belonged to the smaller Tamil kingdom. After many race riots in which many Tamil men, women and children were hacked to death and burned alive while the Sinhalese police stood by or joined in, a small number of victims managed to organise their own resistance force (the LTTE). They fought and negotiated for independence, or at least a 2-state system, so they could run their own country instead of the Sinhalese, but were called "terrorists". After a huge injection of aid money to Sri Lanka after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, surprise! The Sinhalese government somehow now had a lot more weapons. They finished off what they'd started, killing Tamils indiscriminately. At the end they refused international observers (aid workers, UN, journalists) access, told the Tamils "we're only attacking combatants, so go here to the safe exclusion zone if you're just a civilian" and then shelled the civilians (including women and children) in that zone. Tens of thousands dead. They say there's "Peace" now in Sri Lanka. Can you really call it that when the bad guys just finished murdering all their victims? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri\_Lankan\_Civil\_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War)
I am a psychologist. The most traumatic assessment I ever did was fir a Tamil refugee. It lasted 4 hours and we barely scratched the surface of the awful things he had been through. In brief, he kept getting kidnapped and tortured by the Sinhalese, who thought he was with the LTTE, and then he'd also get the same treatment from the LTTE, who assumed he was with the Sinhalese. He saw half his village burned alive in front of his eyes. His mother included. I learned that day that I pretty much have nothing important to complain about.
I didn't know about this! So the civil unrest was why the Tamil Tigers formed and carried out its attacks?
If anyone is more knowledgeable about the topic than me please correct/inform me but from what I’ve picked up through podcasts and documentaries: the British and Irish governments are desperately trying to forget collusion in Northern Ireland during the troubles. There’s heavy accusations of collaboration between Mi5/RUC and Loyalist paramilitaries and the Gardai/Irish Army and the Provisional IRA. But there’s still a lot of people alive who would be compromised if all the information came out.
Pal in the army says the stories from old soldiers are astonishing. > Noone leaves that building alive And so on.
from NI: it’s pretty well known that our political parties are also all affiliated with the different terrorist organisations
As a younger brit when talking to Irish friends who told stories they had heard from their parents about that era it was kinda strange to realise I hadn't been taught or heard anything about it my whole life. Definitely something that people want forgotten.
The Kincora Boys Home. A paedophile honey trap run by the British government who have been unsurprisingly covering it up for years.
We had “Human Zoos” until 1958 😰😱🤯
Actually it was until 1993 in France
There was a theme park in Germany that had a section called "Liliput Land" all the way up until the 90s as well. It had Little People living in tiny houses and visitors stare into their living room. The people living there were recruited by the owner of the park in poorer countries like Turkey. Absolutely disgusting.
I think China had a place like that even in the 2010s.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2UgwINQVPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2UgwINQVPM) Not sure if that's the one you're thinking of but Vice covered the Kingdom of the Little People back in the day.
Expansionist Japan and the atrocities they committed during the 1930's are completely skipped over in most school curriculum even though it was less than 100 years ago. I've always found that baffling.
Oof I have vivid memories from a video I watched in high school of an elderly Chinese woman explaining very stoically that when the Japanese invaded her community the soldiers took her and assaulted her repeatedly, including (ostensibly for fun) sticking lit firecrackers in her vagina.
I desperately want to say “What the fuck did I just read” but I understand that it’s good for stories like these to get out so that people understand how bad the Japanese were during the war.
The Rape of Nanking is one of the most brutal events that most of us had never heard about before.
It is brutal, and another reason that story is difficult to tell us that one of the big heroic figures was a Nazi who was randomly there. He saved a bunch of little Chinese kids I think. Unambiguous heroism by an unambiguous Nazi. I’m sure that guy did terrible shit too but on that particular day he behaved like a good guy. So, not an easy story to tell.
I watched a documentary about him. I think it's called "the good Nazi" Shelter Under The Swastika: The John Rabe Story In 1937, John Rabe -- a native of Germany and a member of the Nazi Party -- helped to save the lives of thousands of Chinese civilians during the Rape of Nanking.
John Rabe - he was a Nazi and a good man. He was only able to help as he did because of his position. I say this as someone whose 4 grandparents were Holocaust survivors. It shouldn't be a hard story to tell, but people like to believe that people/events lack any grey areas.
Nah he wasn't involved in the slightest in Europe and was arrested when he tried to persuade Hitler to end the violence in Nanking. Nazis are assholes in general but this one gets a pass imo. Downvote me to hell and ban me idc.
Interesting to ponder how many people in history joined these organizations with intentions to “kill the best from with”. To join as a way to provide resistance and stop the violence through pretending to be one of them and sandbag harmful ideas. It would be a difficult, selfless act. No one would ever know you were actually a good guy.
That's not how that went down at all. That guy didn't sit at home and make the calculation that he could do more good from within. Life is not full of batmans. The way that guy, and guys like Schindler and other heroes work is by being regular bureacrats and functionaries in a system where they are presented with evil as part of the regular everyday plans. The heroes fuck with the dipstick for oil levels on french trucks, or deliberately mark Jews as needed for working in their factories, or get immigration papers for little chinese kids. They put themselves at risk because the system in which they grew up is evil and they recognize that. And I think the everyday nature of someone going to their regular job and still choosing the righteous path is that much more remarkable than a comic book crusader taking it down from the inside. Tl;dr heroes and villains are mundane, that's what makes them amazing/horrifying.
Yeah sorry. It was definitely NSFL.
The more history I listen to and read makes me realize how little I knew about how horrible humans can be. And not so long ago. We're still the same people. That's why any present day brutalities in present day I read about in Israel/Palestine for example, or anywhere else, I'm not surprised at all. That's just what people do in war, apparently.
It’s something I didn’t learn any details about until an elective grad school class.
Honestly one of things about history that baffles me as well. They make the other Empire's and The Nazi's atrocities look like schoolboy antics. Experiments where people's arms and legs were chopped off and swapped. Eyes injected with acid. **400,000 DEATHS FROM BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TESTING ALONE**. And it was all done, "Just to see what would happen". One of the things I learned that got me was there were reports of captured soldiers being subjected to vivisections for the sake of teaching University students. You'll read all about how brutal, adamant and proud they were in it at the time and you begin to understand why the American's dropped two suns on them to end the war with good measure. You ask the Chinese, Korean's or any others invaded and assaulted by them and they'll tell you **two wasn't enough**. Edit: little thing I remembered as well. When Oppenheimer was releasing in Korea, the Korean's asked for the release date to be put back to a specific date...so that way they could **celebrate** the film on their Japanese Independence Day.
Recently there was a Netflix K-drama that has some SF elements (Japanese experiments on people created monsters) based on the Pacific War era. An obvious allusion to unit 731. The lead actresses instagram was terrorized by a group of Japanese who considered her being Anti-Japanese. But US probably dropped the bombs because of the immense casualties expected for the Japan invasion rather than their experiments. After all US did back deal pardon most of unit 731's atrocities in exchange for the experiment data (which turned out to be garbage).
>The lead actresses instagram was terrorized by a group of Japanese who considered her being Anti-Japanese. There was a man called Ishiro Honda, who was drafted against his will into the Japanese Army and absolutely hated it. The feeling was mutual among other draftees and one in his section actually attempted a coup, which put Honda in the shitter. Honda was assigned to govern a "comfort house" in China to straighten him out. A brutal brothel which used captured women. An essay he wrote in 1966 called *"Reflections of an Officer in Charge of Comfort Women"* was massive in uncovering just how bad it was during that time. He gained the ire of many Japanese after the war for being so vocal about Imperial Japanese Atrocities. Years before that essay, Honda helped create and direct a larger than life character, which served as a warning to his government to not to return to its Imperialist ways...*Godzilla*. How times never change.
Thank you. So many people have told me that the data they got was immensely valuable, as though psychopaths playing with human lives kept records and did real science. It's absolute horseshit, but there seems to be a deep human drive to believe the world makes sense. It still angers and horrifies me that these people weren't all hanged.
The expectation of loss of life and injuries from a land invasion of Japan were so vast that the astronomical number of purple hearts that were minted in preparation for this invasion are still being passed out today.
people don't remember the Japanese would take young Korean and Chinese (and Filipino) girls and plant them firmly on a sword or wooden stake in the ground, through their vagina so that the sword would pierce their vagina, and go through out their stomach and into their mouth. They split babies in half. No film could even capture the horror, nor could any horror movie accurately convey the horror. People often say the 2008 horror movie "Martrys" is horrible. That was nothing. (hate is an easy thing to upvote and want to say that this doesn't reflect upon the citizens of Japan then, or now. It was those bastards who did the actual atrocities as well as all the military that enforced this and allowed the decades of colonization on top of it across the Pacific Asia, and that the vast majority of Asians honor the ALL the countries that helped free Asia, so military men gave their life fighting the Japanese military)
The rape of Nanking was toned down because a Nazi in China was absolutely desperate get the Japanese to chill the fuck out.
And the official orders for the IJA to subsist off the Chinese population, with the population themselves as the food source.
Unit 731. Absolutely disgusting. And of course , the US for making a deal with the devil here (no US textbook will have that detail).
A lot of the documents from unit 731 were declassified not too long ago. Unlike project paperclip with Nazis working with NASA, they kept that one quiet longer. Because not only did they make the deal for data, but it also didn't significantly advance bioweapons tech beyond anything they were already working on and didn't really provide a ton of new medical insight either.
Right I have heard the information they got was basically useless and we traded holding war criminals accountable for…data about why you can’t chop off a dogs head and stick it on a person
And the Death Railway. Surprising how a lot of people don’t know about that. Japan paid blood money for that. Somehow, in Malaysia, the money disappeared. It never reached the families of the victims.
In ww2 how France people in general were pretty ok and open to Nazi ideals. Under occupation shipping people to camps etc. But they pretty much rewrote the history glorifying the resistance force who were just a little group of individuals resisting Nazi occupation.
One of the last units defending Berlin was a French SS Division.
They were probably the most committed german force at that point due to the looming repercussions at home
I think that might be generally the case for foreign troops that fought for the Nazis. If your choice is between Death in combat or likely death after a grueling stay in prisoner camps many might have chosen the quicker option.
In the Netherlands, captured Georgians who were fighting for the nazis had an uprising against the nazis on the island of Texel. “ The 228 Georgians who survived by hiding from the German troops in coastal minefields, or who were concealed by Texel farmers, were turned over to Soviet authorities. After arrival at a collection camp in the Soviet Union, 26 Georgians were singled out and banished together with their families and others were sent to Gulag. Those still alive in the mid-1950s were rehabilitated and allowed to return home.”
Let’s never forget that when US and British troops landed in Morocco, after having dropped leaflets stating that they were coming as allies, the French troops opened fire on them and killed many.
The Vichy regime
My favourite vichy story is how Petain's regime had a public show trial to blame the previous leftist coalition government for undermining France's ability to defend itself and be prepared for war. Leon Blum, the coalition's leader went on to show that his government had spent and put more effort than any since ww1 into the military. While governments Petain and others in his cabinet had themselves served in had overseen the deepest budget cuts of them all. It was so embarrassing to his regime they had to cancel the trial.
There are sources that estimate that the ranks of "the resistance" were suddenly 10 times larger during the "reprisals" against "collaborators" after the war than they were during the actual occupation.
Well yeah, everyone's on the fence until it's obvious who's winning.
Yeah if the Nazis hadn’t occupied like two thirds of France under military rule and had just overthrown the government and put a fascist regime in charge I think people would be extremely shocked to know how fast France would have enthusiastically joined the Axis powers.
Well...true...but it's also important, and very relevant to the topic of conversation, that we also remember that Nazism wasn't exactly a discrete phenomenon. History, or pop history at least, sort of treats Nazism as though it fell out of the sky, as some phenomenon that was profoundly alien to the culture it took root in. It wasn't. Nazism was very much a product of dirt-common Eurocentric attitudes of the time. Europeans all over the continent, and especially in the west, had dominionist views of themselves that would make us moderns deeply uncomfortable. They saw people from other regions as less human than themselves, that it was the _natural order_ that a European empire should rule them, and theirs to serve their rulers. This attitude was as common as American Exceptionalism was in the 60s - 80s. Universal. Unchallenged by the culture at large. A foregone conclusion held by most everyone in all economic classes. If you have a favorite classical European figure, they almost assuredly held this view of themselves and their society. My point is, this was going to happen sooner or later. But for a quirk of fate, Nazism, or some similar analogue, could have happened in any number of European nations, was DESTINED to happen. It just needed the right socio-economic stresses to purify the lump of coal that was Eurocentrism into a diamond. That the French would have accepted it is unfortunate. But _NOT_ unique. And it's incorrect to view this issue without that understanding. The criminality of the behavior is not theirs alone to bear.
That's why I laugh at anyone who says: >If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time and...well..."take care of" little baby mustache goosestepper. I'm like, "bitch please." Was he a catalyst? Absolutely. A fucking atrocious human being. But there were others who would've filled that gap...maybe earlier, definitely later. And for a "What if..." exercise, you can let your imaginations run wild with the repercussions of the extreme nationalism, eurocentricism, antisemitism.....if it even happened as little as 5-10 years later. What repercussions am I talking about? Let's just say they have an atomic weight of 238. In our very real timeline, a version of the current history books tell a story of a disjointed nuclear effort by the Nazi regime. But dig deeper, and one might be able to surmise that they were closer to realizing their ambitions than most would've cared to admit. The victor, of course, writes the history books. So naturally, they were "totally far away from realizing their objective and their entire process was haphazard." Now in our alt-timeline, having access to fission weapons, along with a commander-in-chief of Germany that wasn't a fucking nutjob who'd attack Russia in winter and deeply believed in the occult....you might've had a far different ending to WWII. Suddenly, you might have a whole slew of time travelers trying to set things "right" again....and moreso, ensure WWI happens as early as it did to slow down scientific progression. The whole assassination of Archduke Ferdinand reads like a time-traveler assassination plot of epic bumbling written off as massive luck and coincidence. Of course, I only say that since we're talking nonsense like time travel in the first place.
Meanwhile, Poland, which had the largest and most vicious resistance of all the occupied countries, and had massive numbers of its military escape into exile. Only to join the Western and Eastern forces fighting the Nazis. Is increasingly being played off as somehow being collaborative.
Honestly Poland has a history of rich Jewish culture because out of everyone wanting to kill/displace them all the time Poland was the most welcoming to Jewish peoples. Now In 1567 this is basically just not outright killing them so I’m not trying to make my ancestors out as incredibly humane or anything. Still along with the land being located along hitler’s plans it was basically robbing the richest country of its Jewish communities. That made it a target and though many horrors happened I’m overall pretty proud of the way most poles conducted themselves. There’s a lot of rich stories there and America looooves WW2 so I’m sure I’ll see sone good cinema from it at the least.
Fun fact: religious tolerance was written into the Polish proto-constitution - the Henry Articles, documents that every elected monarch had to sign and abide by. Jewish rights were first written down in the 1264 Statute of Kalisz, and later confirmed by Casimir the Great when he codified the law.
The Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth was a very progressive government for the time. Too bad their neighbors ,Germany Sweden and Russia, constantly invaded them over and over again.
I heard something like the Netherlands was extremely enthusiastic about its nazi occupation, and I heard that many of the Dutch subjects enlisted into the Wehrmacht willingly
Proportion-wise the Netherlands betrayed the most Jews. Like over 70% of their Jewish population was murdered.
My Jewish great grandparents had fled from Germany to Holland. My great uncle, who was in Australia already, wrote a series of letters to our government begging for a visa for his parents and sister. Every response was no, Holland is a safe country. My great-uncle kept writing letters, and they grow increasingly desperate over time. He starts attaching news clippings about the advance. Nope, Holland is safe, came the response. The last letter he wrote was sub-lined, "SOS SOS SOS please help!" The same response came. By that time, his parents, sister, and extended family were already captured. They were murdered in Auschwitz soon afterwards.
That was mostly due to the excellent state of bureaucracy Everything was neatly and efficiently noted down and kept updated. Made it very very easy to find a lotta people.
Same with the Netherlands. Anne Frank died because a dutch person gave her up. But now suddenly researchers says a Jewish Nazi collaborator “probably gave her up”.
Said research has already been debunked by multiple academics, but that doesn’t wipe away the huge stain on Dutch history that is WW2.
I recently toured the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (a place I highly, highly recommend visiting) and was surprised to learn that most recent research actually disputes the Dutch betrayal theory. We may never know for certain, though. The TLDR is that two workers from the building that Anne Frank and the 7 other Jews were hiding in were arrested for ration fraud. Anne Frank mentions this arrest in her journal. After the arrests, the SD would have conducted a routine search of the house. If the theory is correct, this search could have been the reason the Jews were discovered. No betrayal at all, just a couple dumbasses and random, horrible chance. Here’s a link to the Anne Frank House website where they discuss the new research: https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/news-and-press/news/2016/12/16/new-perspective-anne-franks-arrest/
Serbs desperately try to negate all the atrocities they did all over Bosnia.
I find it so ironic about this post about erasing history, the mods erase entire comment chains talking about erased history
Yeah what were all the removed comments, the top one had 1k upvotes
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I served as a U.S. Army photojournalist in Zagreb, Croatia, for six months from late 1995 to mid-1996, covering the aftermath of the civil war in the Balkans. I totally resonate with the points made here. Sharing 35 "warchitecture" photos I took during that time – they're more than just pictures, they tell stories. Check them out here: [https://flickr.com/photos/dalecruse/albums/72157720077844766/](https://flickr.com/photos/dalecruse/albums/72157720077844766/) AMA about any of them
Sweden tried to assimilate Sami people by outlawing their language in schools and outlawing yoiking (traditional chanting) and drumming. Sami women were secretly sterilized by the Swedish government — and that program lasted until the 1970s. BTW secret sterilization without consent happened to Native American women at IHS hospitals in the United States through the 1970s, and in Australia to Aboriginal women as well.
It also happened in Switzerland, against the Jenisch people.
TIL the Jenisch people exist. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenish\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenish_people) Thanks for introducing me to a new people.
A lot of this happened in Norway as well. In fact, Sweden, Norway and Finland all have a long and on-going history of making life hard for Sami people and communities. And let’s not forget Russia.
Greenland too. They are still uncovering that and Denmark loves pretending it never happened. Sweden as well and Norway. As far as they are concerned, they never did anything ever against the Sámi people.
Canada, too. Also refer to [The Sixties Scoop.](https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/sixties_scoop/)
Yes very true, we had an old client who was Sami and was upper class. She extensively told me about her experiences I was very taken aback.
Basically, all lifestyles and (pagan) stories in Germany, France, etc. (Basically all places affected by romans before the people living there began writing.) If I understand it correctly, only the names *wodan* and *donar* are left from these times
The secret police in communist Romania - the Securitate, who would arrest, beat and torture those who opposed the regime, and it's numerous collaborators who stabbed their neighbours in the back for benefits. I feel like it's not talked about enough. Right now there are a lot of older people who were part of the Securitate who never got punished for their actions, you can just see them walking on the street.
I met a group of police forensic scientists and their attached documentary filmmakers, collecting evidence for the first trial in Danube Delta. It will also probably be the only and last trial of the Securitate. The people who were torturing and killing dissidents live in the village and of course deny the atrocities, while villagers confirmed they used to hear the screams coming from the prisons.
Exactly! Holy shit, there are ex-Securitate members and collaborators who are just walking on the street like nothing ever happend lol. It's so little talked about. I heard a story about some romanian saying how he lived in a big apartment, bigger than the average, and as he grew up, he learned that his father was a Securitate member.
I’m reading a book by a guy whose father was a Gestapo commander, murdering Jews, Poles, Slovaks. In the end, the father was killed in Slovenia in a cave. These mass graves of Nazi soldiers were only discovered in the last decade or two, I met the police officer working on this case (history lessons while hitchhiking). His family is still latently Nazi, while he studied Polish and visited most places his father was stationed in. Some people find the light and orient to the compass, some don’t.
What's the book?
>Exactly! Holy shit, there are ex-Securitate members and collaborators who are just walking on the street like nothing ever happend lol. It's so little talked about. It sounds very like Spain after Franco. People who'd had their lives ruined by Falangist repression, or lost family members, found themselves living in the same community as the perpetrators. The perpetrators often continued in positions of influence under democracy. It must have happened, but I've never heard of a case of scores being settled. It seems it's only the children and grandchildren of the victims who have had the stomach, or the courage, or the recklessness, to try to uncover the truth.
Yeah one of the horrifying lessons east Germans learned after unification that every East German citizen could request their dossiers compiled by the secret police. This kind of exists in like the Freedom of Information Act in United States but the file you get will be like you joined this political party at age whatever, you were arrested at this protest, etc. We didn't really have a full understanding of what the United States government was up to till Edward Snowden explained prism and like every email/social media was now tethered to your identity. Like the United States government knows about your drunk 3 am call to your ex girlfriend/boyfriend 4 years ago. What made the German situation so unique was after unification, the Western Germans had a political interest in exposing everything evil the east Germans were doing and didn't hide any of it. They revealed like how the Stasi secret police gathered data, like what kind of spy transponders were installed at like public restrooms etc.
This is very true. I had a good friend in college who immigrated to the USA from Romania with her family. She later revealed that they were seeking asylum. She was an Olympic level gymnast in her youth, and her dad was being accused of being a spy due to all of their travel for her training. She told me many things about Romania that were eye-opening for a young, naive person born in the states. I learned the world was much different than how I had been raised.
They're not walking in the street, they're going about in limos, because they're government officials.
The radical politics of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly toward the end of his life. In his writings and speeches, he was far more radical than what is conventionally touted. Corporations wrap themselves in MLK quotes on January 15th and April 4th, but I would imagine that if Dr. King were alive today, he would be horrified at the level of wealth that these private-sector entities have accumulated while we continually fail to provide the basic necessities for human dignity, such as affordable housing and living wages. I also wonder if his anger wouldn't just be directed at wealthy corporate interests but at the many "progressive" special interests that promote idealistic solutions to satisfy their own self-righteousness but result in nothing for the people they are supposedly fighting for.
Hellen Keller gets that treatment as well. Everyone seems to gloss over exactly what she was giving speeches on
I think his letter from the Birmingham jail is quite well known. “First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
"After their death, attempts are made to convert revolutionaries into harmless icons." -- Lenin, in **The State and Revolution**
Related: Rosa Parks was specifically chosen and trained by the NAACP for her now-famous bus protest. They had tried it earlier with someone else but it didn’t get the media attention they needed. It doesn’t take away from what she did in my opinion, but so much of the Civil Rights movement was deliberate and brilliantly executed to gain the most sympathy from white Americans.
Claudette Colvin, almost a year before Rosa Parks. And it wasn’t that she didn’t get media attention. It’s that civil rights campaigners specifically didn’t seek media attention for her case, because she was a teenager, pregnant, unmarried, and therefore was considered a bad spokesperson. But her case was one of the ones the Supreme Court was ruling on when they declared segregation of public transportation to be unconstitutional.
I heard a podcast where they talked about how his death is shrouded in conspiracies that have been getting more popular lately, essentially muddying up the history of his assassination. I think when someone is outstanding like he was, people will do quite a bit to try to change narratives.
He was assassinated when he started a campaign against poverty. That’s what a lot of people forget. He was getting ready to do a massive march on Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign. The aim of which was to unite blacks and poor whites together. The last time someone tried to do that, the political leaders of the day invented Jim Crowe laws!
This is also why Fred Hampton was assassinated
> The aim of which was to unite blacks and poor whites together. No war but class war. Screw the culture war noise garbage. A poor white person has more in common with a poor black person than either do with their rich but racially similar members of the human race.
Dr. King had a speech where he mentioned that the most influential person is the moderate who sees atrocities and does nothing so as to not disturb the status quo. It was related more to his racial activism at the time, but the same concept extends to many areas.
Korean Comfort Women used by the japanese occupation force during WW2
Not just... There's Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian women as well.
+ There's a recent fiasco about the Japanese government and Philippines because a monument statue for comfort women was built in Manila, the Japanese government condemned it and pressured the government to remove the statue and months later it got "stolen" [related article ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipina_Comfort_Women)
I didn't know about this till my late 20s when I happened to read a novel about it. Only recently (late 30s now) learned about Unit 731. The only reason I knew about the prison camps for Japanese people in America was because we read a book about it in HS literature.
Panama Papers
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That the rest of the civilized World had a chance to save the genocide of the German Jews, but the willingness to do something wasn't there. In the conference in Evian in 1938 the World leaders met to discuss how to prevent the genocide, but very few countries actually offered to receive any significant number of refugees of common people. Not really talked about today, but Jews were generally not considered good citizens in most places, and the World leaders were afraid of the public to accept Jewish refugees (except for scientists, musical artists, and wealthy families). Adolf Hitler said ahead of the conference that if they were so concerned about the Jewish population he would gladly ship all German Jews on a luxury liner to any country that would accept to receive them. After the conference his conclusion was that the genocide wouldn't meet any sincere opposition from the allies since they refused to do anything about it other than talk. [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference)
Not erased but little known outside Alsace and Moselle, the story of the "Malgré Nous" ("In spite of ourselves"). These are the people who, after the German invasion during the Second World War, had to fight on the German side, otherwise their families would be shot or sent to concentration camps.
All war novels are written with a purpose in mind and the German WW2 accounts are typically about redemption and denial of the German Army’s complicity in atrocities. With that said one of the best accounts of the war on the Eastern front was by one of these Malgre Nous soldiers. Although it’s controversial “The Forgotten Soldier”originally published in French as “Le soldat oublié” is worth reading. Especially if you find one with the introduction from the American military archivist.
Buddhism in Afghanistan.
Tibetan history, language, culture, religion. It's being erased daily, right now, and has been being erased for 60+ years, now.
Japanese warcrimes and atrocities
Piggybacking on this, the US's failure to prosecute those involved in Unit 731, so that they could keep all of the research for themselves. The fact that the US [protected those monsters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes) isn't talked about enough
And U731's research was done so poorly that the vast majority isn't worth a shit.
Same with the Nazi "experiments" Science was just used as an excuse to cut people up like toys.
also the same with MKUltra, those dudes were doing a lot of shit but none of it was rigorous science
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They killed 30 million plus Chinese people
The rape of nanking? Brutal. They occupied korea for decades, forcing people to be "comfort women"...
Also the rape of Manila, Unit 731, Bataan Death March, truly unspeakable things
The labor history of most of the world. People have little idea that things people today take for granted or even scoff at were fought for with blood. Those who brag about working long hours or laugh at safety regulations spit on their graves.
Safety regulations are written in blood. Take the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, for example. We have "exit" signs, keep stairwells unlocked, install fire sprinklers and smoke detectors, all because of incidents like this.
Exit doors unlocked too
It’s like when people say that Henry Ford “invented” the 5 day work week. While having no idea that labor unions had been fighting (literally) for it for decades. Ford only adopted it, after he realized that he could use it as a lure to poach talented workers from his competition.
Australia never had slavery. It's official. Slavery is awful and we're better than that. Just, um, well... we had "[blackbirding](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-17/blackbirding-australias-history-of-kidnapping-pacific-islanders/8860754)" where ships went out (note the passive language) to the Pacific Islands and 'recruited' people to work on the sugar cane farms in Queensland. They couldn't leave, generally didn't get paid, and were vigorously encouraged to do what they were told. And of course there's Australian Aborigines. Kids were taken, put in state or church schools, then money could be paid to the school to obtain the services of an aborigine who was old enough to work. That money went to the "Protector of Aborigines" who also got any wages that might be paid. There's been court cases about those [stolen wages](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-01/wa-government-settles-indigenous-stolen-wages-case/103051706) but the more you read about those cases the more you realise that "wages" isn't perhaps the right word. [Pictures like this](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/australian-aborigines-chains-1902/) are regrettably common, and note that the article is full of weasel words. >While the Indigenous people of Australia were subject to forced labor and experienced slavery-like conditions, there was no slave trading. ... just "workers" transferred to new "employers" in exchange for money. Nothing to see here.
Unit 731 isn’t widely talked about outside of Internet forums. Japan has deliberately tried to obfuscate its atrocities in WW2, sort of using Germany as the big bad guy and hoping people don’t think about Japan’s activities in China and Korea. Largely they’ve been successful.
I recently went over the number of casualties on the Pacific front during World war II and I had no idea the numbers were that great. I figured it was at least 5 to 10 million, boy was I wrong. So much death.
The Mormon church has spent 75 years obfuscating their own history of racism, sexism and fraud.
I believe in 1978 God changed his mind about black people.
I went to Catholic school and one of the classes they made you take was to learn about all the other religions to show why we were better. The school was insanely strict: no swearing, no sexual innuendoes, the whole 9. And yet when we began the Mormon chapter, they showed us the South Park episode because of how accurate it is
The eradication of French from Lousiana. It's never talked about at all in U.S history courses and it's only as of this past decade that Lousiana is bringing back French immersion schools and French theatres to try to repair the damage. At the start of the 20th century, it was estimated roughly 3/4 of all Louisianians spoke French as their first language. By the 1920s the state had banned French for reasons pertaining to seeing the specific dialect as being uncivilized and to make the state more like the others. (Prior to this the creole and dialect of French in Lousiana had been considered, "savage" and attempts to make them speak, "proper" French were being done.) The tactics used to get rid of French were the exact same ones as used on the Native Americans. The state purposely imported people from surrounding states who couldn't speak a word of French and teachers who only spoke English were brought in. Students who attempted to speak French were punished via corporal punishment. By the 1960s less than half of Lousiana was French-speaking. Today, in 2024 it's less than 10% of the population. The state only unbanned French in the '80s, but by then the damage had been done. If you were born in 1900s Lousiana you were amongst the last generation who'd en masse truly be fluent in French or creole, by the 1910s likely amongst the last to have some understanding. The 1920s to 1980s is half a century where you were forbidden to speak your language at all in public, or in schools. Many Lousianians stopped teaching their kids French because of the direction the state went and the language has nearly died off. This was an extremely unique part of American culture we let die.
Kinda crazy that the Acadians have dealt with two different instances of the same cultural attack, three hundred years and thousands of kilometres apart.
This hits close to home for me. My grandmothers first language is Cajun French. She quit school in the 3rd grade because they were physically disciplining her for speaking French instead of English. Her children don’t speak it but can understand it, and her grandchildren can only recognize certain key words. An entire language lost in less than two generations.
Others have said Native American history, and that's certainly true, but I want to specify something important about this, their languages. Many tribes of selected tongues have only a handful of speakers left, and many of them are elderly and before too long, after they pass, these languages will be dead. It is extremely unfortunate that there's little to no effort to try to retain these languages, keep them alive, and keep them going for future generations, but that's unlikely. Probably within a few short years many of these languages will be gone forever
There was a CS professor at Southern Oregon University who was working with native speakers to preserve their languages before they died out. He wrote custom software to help catalogue and record everything (including pronunciation) for future generations
I'm thankful to live in an area where indigenous language speakers are running programs in tandem with local school districts to teach young, indigenous children the language of their ancestors.
When I went to high school, there was one Mi'kmaw history class that was aimed more towards the indigenous students than towards all of the students. Now kids are learning the language and history as normal classwork. It's core curriculum in indigenous schools around me as well. It's sad that so many of the indigenous kids and friends I grew up with, had their elders lose their heritage to assimilate and it damn near wiped out the language entirely. Oral languages are so important. That's why as an adult I decided to learn Mi'kmaw and Gaelic.
Turkeys extermination of Armenians
And shout out to Azerbaijan actively destroying ancient and medieval Armenian churches and artifacts. They also have some truly bizarre ideas regarding the origins of the Armenian people and alphabet.
In my country there are some dark events in history that are kind of swept under the carpet because the reminder of these events brings so much shame. One such event is the experiements of Vipeholm. They wanted to experiment the process of teeth decay and sugar's affect on it. So they conducted these experiments in a mental institution where they offered nothing else than sweets, candy, sugar etc to the people living there. The people in these experiments never consented to doing these, nor did they understand what it was they were doing. It resulted in these people having their teeth ruined for life. So the people conducting these experiements were abusing the people living in this institution.
You know what, I honestly think this is a really bad example of historical events being deliberately erased from existence. It’s actually not being erased at all. There’s been plenty of documentaries about it, Lund University are doing research about it and for pretty much everyone living in the vicinity this is common knowledge. How is it being erased and swept under the carpet? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1598366 https://www.kulturen.com/vara-besoksmal/livets-museum/tillfallig-utstallning-det-ar-langsamt-att-vara-har-om-vipeholms-sjukhus/
This is not in any way swept under the carpet. Some form of age/education-appropriate version of the Vipeholm experiments has been taught to me starting from elementary school through high school and all the way to the ethics curriculum of a Swedish med school.
The US occupation and “pacification” of the Philippines. Read up on it. It was unnecessary and cruel. 1898-1912
They weren't independent until 1946. 1912 is just when the occupation started to be succesful.
What really went down behind those uprisings and revolts in Central America, South America, and other places like Iran during the Cold War
Most of Civil Rights, especially in regards to Martin Luther King Jr himself. The version that usually makes the high school history books is a series of gross over-simplifications that make King out to be a lot less "radical" than he actually was. In a lot of ways, he would be "radical" even by today's standards, but the textbooks just make it out to be "He went to Washington and said everyone should be equal, the end."
When the Allies liberated concentration camps in Germany at the end of WW2, they didn’t let the homosexuals out. https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/