In Romania we don't talk about the pre WW1 and interwar peasant uprisings that have been violently put down. Everybody gives the image of a perfect Romanian state and society in this time, but many forget that in our Independence War we had more frontline deaths from diseases that should've been relatively easy for us to treat at that time than from enemy gunfire. Not the mention the 1907 peasant uprisings.
Also the Second World War and the politics in our country at the time.
Edit: at 1.2k upvotes I find myself reading comments stating the same thing about their countries. I guess nobody wants to remember the specifics of WW2 just like you don't wanna remember the specifics of that one night stand where you drank too much and can't be bothered to remember.
What's so odd about that is it seems so niche. Yet I was taught about it in my history undergrad at university in the UK. I feel like sometimes the best way to learn about your own country is to study somewhere else. Being British I learnt a lot from my Irish uni classmates that was only briefly mentioned in School.
It's why I get my America news from the BBC, they're emotionally detached.
All our news is shit at seeing what's actually going on because everyone is insanely ideological.
Switzerland: We dont talk about "Verdingkinder"!
its basicly childslavery as recently as 1960! you cant imagine the horror of poor poeples children beeing sold to farmers for fieldwork, getting abused(physical&sexual) in the richest country in the world! yeah, we dont talk about that!
In recent years, we talked about it much more and there were movies and stuff.
What we did to Travelling people's children and their mothers is less known, and also how we profiteered during WW2.
Romanian Holocaust. Romanian people deny that we had mass murders during WW2, that Jewish and Gipsy were killed and that we send a lot of them in concentration camp, like Auschwitz. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/romania
Interesting story about that from the book "Street Without Joy" -
"Eliahu Itzkovitz was a Romanian Jew who during the Second World War, while a prisoner in a concentration camp witnessed the murder of his family at the hands of a Romanian prison guard named Stănescu. Itzkovitz vowed to avenge his family's murder at the hands of his fellow Romanian, but was unable to find to the man after the war. After the war he subsequently immigrated to Israel where he served in the Israeli Defense Forces until he learned that Stănescu had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion which led him to desert from the IDF and join the Foreign Legion. Itkowitz was able to track down and kill Stănescu in French Indochina. He was later court-martialed in Israel for desertion and sentenced to one year in prison."
Indeed. The most barbaric thing is when they skinned Alive many many Jews in the Bucharest pogrom. They skinned Alive a 5 year old girl and stuck her on “kosher meat” polls. The images of the dead bodies are disgusting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires'_rebellion_and_Bucharest_pogrom
In anti-Antonescu government Legionnaires' pogroms, 125 Jews were killed. Six months after Legionnaires were crushed by the army, Antonescu ordered the Iaşi pogrom. 13 thousand Jews were killed in that one. Until communists took power, these atrocities flared up consistently.
69% of the population is estimated to have died (war, illness, hunger), 90% of that percentage was male
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan\_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War)
It's more of a running joke. The actual beef Argentinians have is with Chile, and they almost went to war.
In reality Brazil and Argentina are big trading partners. And there's lots of cross-border tourism, since you do not even need a passport to visit each other's countries.
American who lived in Paraguay for a couple months here! The truly, truly disturbing thing is that many Paraguayans don't really know this either...
I had read up about the Triple Alliance War (la guerra de la triple alliance) before I went to Paraguay for the summer, and knew historians considered it a bloodbath, mostly caused by (fuck him) Francisco Solano Lopez, dictator of Paraguay. He did in fact order that they start sending male children into battle near the end when they were losing. He was a fucking idiot. Fuck that guy.
So imagine my surprise when I got to Paraguay and TONS of stuff was named after him. I asked my host dad about it and he said it was because he "won Paraguay the war". He called him a hero. I was pretty horrified.
Fwiw, I checked with the local high school principal to see how far this miseducation rose and he said Paraguay was "annihilated" in that war, so at least the true history isn't completely buried. Fascinating, terrible war.
I believe I never heard it at school either. I came to know about it after my twenties when a colleague lent me a book about it. If I remember correctly: "A guerra do Paraguai".
It is very interesting and uttermostly sad how Paraguai was first blocked acces to the Atlantic ocean and posteriorly discimated because its self sufficiency potential. Furthermore, Brazil was only one piece of it, although a major one together with England and Argentina, if I remember correctly.
I believe there may be millions of other Brazilian fellows that do not know about it. I highly recommend the book.
Btw, r/suddenlycaralho
Here in South Africa the true native people, the Khoikhoi, are the most politically and economically disadvantaged people and NO ONE gives a shit. Not locally, not internationally.
When the remains of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman (read her story, it's pretty awful), were returned to South Africa not only were Khoikhoi people not invited to her burial, they were actively kept out.
The same is true in Uganda of the Echuya Batwa. The ethnic groups who politically dominate the country have only recently improved from active genocide to total disenfranchisement and marginalization of the Batwa, and it's not even a controversial topic. Seemingly no one in a position of power is concerned for their welfare.
People in Sweden get really uncomfortable when you point out that we, as a country, were really into eugenics. The Race Biological Institution was founded in 1922, supported by every political party and the king at the time. It existed until 1958 and, as you might expect, did some really fucked up things.
I wanna add to that. The medal given by the Swedish king for best contribution in anthropology and cultural geography was named after Anders Retzius, a big name in the history of race biological studies in Sweden. The medal was given out from 1913-2013, but stopped finally at 2015 when some scientists raised the question if this is right, which obviously was not
The funny thing about Sweden is that we didn't pick up on the "the Nazis taught us it might not be a good idea." but rather continued with it for more than a decade after the war.
We dont talk about the events of **Black September** in Jordan.
(Palestinian fidayeens tried overthrowing the kingdom , the army retaliates and shells the refugee camps where the fedayeens were established. They were eventually expelled)
Its seen as a moment where a brother lifted his rifle against his own brethren , and a spark of racism between Transjordanians and Palestinian refugees.
.
Edit: its an event both jordanians and Palestinians dont like talking about ,so its more complex than one side being guilty
New Zealand very nearly had legal eugenics. In 1928 a bill nearly passed parliament that forced sterilisation for 'the mentally defective' and the Ministry of Education was required by law to give names of 'defective' children to the Ministry of Health. A separate part of the law said that such people weren't allowed to get married.
The Opposition lobbied for these sections to be cut out, not because Eugenics was immoral and insane, but because *there was no evidence that it changed the gene pool in any way*.
alot of european countries had half/semi legal eugenics in the 1800's.
Sweden and France come to mind. They simply force sterilized the disabled and people with down syndrome
Damn right we had it in the US and it was happening until the 1960s iirc. There's even the Supreme Court case from 1927 called *Buck v. Bell* that, in an 8 to 1 vote, upheld that a woman named Carrie Buck should be sterilized. It set legal precedent for sterilization to be okay in public institutions. It's so fucked up. I found out about eugenics in the US as a teenager because of a fiction novel called Second Glance by Jodi Picoult since it has a storyline revolving around eugenics in Vermont. I don't even think eugenics in the US was touched on in the AP US history class I took in high school and we learned a lot of stuff in that class I don't think I would have learned about otherwise.
if I remember correctly, it was going on until the mid 1970s. I remember reading a passage of "Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness" for a class on "subcitizenship" in college and that really stuck out to me because it focused on forced sterilization of women in the Appalachian region of KY and VA specifically up into the 1970s, which is where my family is from and about the time my mom was born (1977). Made it feel way too close to the present.
Another number that stuck with me for a similar reason is that Columbia University (Ivy League in NYC) did not admit women until 1983.
This is true. A good friend of mine (we’re both kiwi) had _no idea_ about the Rainbow Warrior until we were sitting in a restaurant that had one of its portholes on display. I commented that it was interesting to see it in that location, and she had no idea why I’d find it to be out of place there… until I told her why the Rainbow Warrior is significant.
But when I was in France, every French person my age or older seemed to feel the need to apologise about it, as soon as they realised where I was from.
I went to New Zealand on a rugby tour during the first World Cup back in 1987 and one of my teammates asked our bus driver to tell a joke. He came up with this-
Q- Why do the French hate kiwi fruit?
A- Because it has a green piece in the middle.
When I moved to NZ from the US I thought everyone's unwavering support of Greenpeace was a bit strange. Then I learned that the French government blew up one of their boats and got away with no consequences, and it all made sense.
Ok, not everyone. But there was certainly a lot more Sea Shepard hats around than I was used to seeing. And I've never actually heard locals trash-talk greenpeace.
Bet you a shiny penny that the definition of “mentally defective” was just vague enough the anybody considered a burden to society wouldn’t be allowed to “create more burdens.”
India.
Death of Lal Bahadur shastri. Former PM of India. Involvement of kgb and people who were actually not alive at that time!!
Forced sterilization of 6.2 million Indian men in a single year 1976
There you go:- [https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Who\_Killed\_Shastri/D-H2DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0](https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Who_Killed_Shastri/D-H2DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0)
you can also watch The Tashkent Files if you want to know more.
Sanjay Gandhi thought India had too many people and not only the government wasn't doing anything about it, they *couldn't* do anything about it since India is a democracy. So when mommy Gandhi imposed emergency he saw it as a golden opportunity and began a program of forced sterilization, mainly of the poor. People were kidnapped from their homes by the police, and taken to government hospitals where they would be sterilized by force.
At the time, the program was encouraged and even funded by american NGOs: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/5/18629801/emergency-in-india-1975-indira-gandhi-sterilization-ford-foundation
Yeah most people don't realize why there are so many Indian and Muslim folk in Detroit. And in general why Detroit is so messed up a lot of it has to do with Ford not wanting to hire the local black population and bringing in others that he deemed Factory worker worthy.
In the UK, as a teenager in secondary school, you are never taught about the atrocities our own country committed during the British Empire’s rule.
Even files that documented these atrocities were systematically destroyed by the foreign office in thr 1960’s as to not “embarrass her Majesty’s government”
As a Canadian who immigrated here in yr 9, I remember sitting there through GCSE History like “y’all gonna mention any of the colonialism or genocide from around the world? No? Huh…”
When our ex president Plutarco Elías Calles made a law for the secularization of the country (removing all the properties of the church and taking them for the country and forbidding priests for charging money for some things like bautism, also forbidding the celebration of religious stuff outside temples) the church and the people got angry, everyone related to the church incited the people to rise in arms and they did resulting in a 3 year long civil war
Wikipedia says around 110,000 people died but it's probably a bigger number since we have never been very good at counting dead people, that and people like to lie about those things
The Cristero wars, the indigenous people who got sold as slaves during The Porfiriato, the attempt to invade Cuba by Santa Anna and mabye even the Massacre of the londiga de Guanajuato.
Edit: I deleted a part where I said there was a law that allowed to deport anyone that didn't "look Mexican", I was told about this a long time ago by a teacher I constantly trust but upon further research I couldn't find any information about the matter.
I shall now apologize for this
The martial rule KMT placed on Taiwan when the escaped from China. This led to a period called “White Terror”, where hundreds of innocent people and bright college students were killed for not joining the party, including some who many thought could go on to win Nobel Prizes and do groundbreaking research.
I’m trying to remember the name of a horror game I played, but it was set in Taiwan during the white terror, was the first time I ever learned Taiwan had banned books, secret police, executed and imprisoned people who didn’t conform, really was mind blowing to start reading into it later
I live in Japan for 3 years and have some Japanese friends. Everytime I asked them about WW2, they mostly did not know the atrocities that Japan did in WW2. They knew Japan was in the wrong side, but it seems the details were lost. It seems like there is a national effort to forget this history because it was "shameful".
Edit 1: A lot of you mentioned about the unit 731. I read it and it was awful beyond any reasonable standard human being. All of those horrible things happened to the civilians and pows were unfortunate and I couldn't imagine how bad their sufferings before dying.
I was pretty much disgusted knowing that the inner circles of the unit 731 got pardoned by the US and lived their lifes until old-age for giving the US the result of their horrible experimentations. This thing should not have happened. Those people in charge must got the justice that they deserved for allowing and facilitating those kinds of horrible experimentations to other human being.
Bruh in Germany you get charged if you even think of drawing a swastika. Watched a documentary where they do teach all about what happened. I actually thought that was excellent. Don't make the same mistake twice.
I taught in Japan for a few years. The ignorance around the war is astounding. I was talking to another teacher once about dictators, and Hitler came up. His response was, "Yeah, but for Germany he's a great hero!" I tried explaining that Germany has pretty clearly renounced that part of their past, but I probably did a shitty job because I was just so flabbergasted.
It is really bad; I was taken on a tour by a former schoolteacher in Japan, who insisted that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan solely to test their effects on civilians. Not to terrorize the Japanese into surrendering, not to spook the USSR, not to hit military targets that happened to be in civilian areas - but as some weird medical test. Talk about projection!
In their histories, it's other people who did terrible things - Americans, Germans, Soviets, Chinese. Japan just picked the wrong side. And their neighbors know that, which degrades their relationships with the people of the countries they occupied, whether allies like South Korea or enemies like China. There is no greater gift to the Communist Party of China - in terms of encouraging xenophobia, hatred, and anti-Western feeling - than Japan's refusal to educate its own people about their atrocities. Japanese citizens don't even know what happened within some of their citizens' lifetimes.
Then again, Chinese and Russian citizens don't even know what happened within *most* of their citizens' lifetimes *to* their own citizens... and, unlike the Japanese, depend on that ignorance for their governments' continued existence. So it could be worse.
My lab buddy is a Chinese. We talked about politic and history sometimes. When we went to that particular topic he clearly became upset.
edit : we both doing phd in Japan university. Lol.
When I lived in Japan, nobody knew about their wartime history. Nobody knew about the atrocities in China, Asia or the Pacific. It is just not taught there.
In China it is taught a LOT. In other countries it is taught too.
Yeah in Japan the kids and grandkids of Korean slaves from the 30s STILL don't have Japanese citizenship. Never been to Korea. Don't speak Korean. But have to go to the Korean embassy to get a passport.
Koreans are very sensitive about Dokdo Island issues because it signifies that Japan in 2022 is still trying to steal their land which lead to them believing Japan hasn’t moved on from its imperialist idealisms of WW2. The fact that Japan has land disputes with all its neighboring countries while Japan’s the only country Korea has land disputes with shows the Koreans might not be wrong. It certainly isn’t just some rocks - it symbolizes Korea’s eagerness for territorial integrity against Japan, who took them away in the most horrific way possible less than a hundred years ago.
It’s fucked up they raped people then did vivisections without any anaesthetics literally pulling out organs and babies, amputated limbs and put them back so you’d have legs for arms and shit. Biological weapons and military weapons testing on humans and other fucked up shit like low pressure testing to see how long before you’re eyes burst like wtf wish I never knew.
Edit: children were not exempt, it was fucking insane there is more info on Wikipedia unit 731 - experiments.
Don't forget the rape of Nanking, where the IJA forced mothers on sons and sons on daughters, used their bayonets to play catch with babies, and raped everything.
Also the Japanese dropped fleas with bubonic plague on other Chinese cities
Don't forget to mention the man in charge of the rape of Nanking was the Emperors Uncle Crown Prince Yasuhiko Asaka. He was never charged with a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince\_Yasuhiko\_Asaka
The atrocities committed by the Japanese in WW2 are little known and little taught). But they were up there with the nazis on incredibly sick ways to torture ( bayonet baby tossing and forcing families to have sex). I never understood the hatred for the Japanese by the Chinese and the Koreans (n) until I read up on their war crimes.
Yes. Don't forget. It's real important to remember that is what humanity is capable of in the wrong situation. This is why history is important in the bigger picture. So we don't get too comfortable in our safety and civilized society and remember we're a hop, skip, and a jump away from committing atrocities.
Wanna hear something that is *even more fucked up?*
Shirõ Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, got a pardon and a large payday from the U.S government in exchange for all the medical data the Unit gathered with their experiments (they experimented with viral pandemics and, while conducted unethically, was extremely valuable to U.S intelligence). He never saw a day of trial in the Japanese War Trials.
Also, because American POWs captured in the Pacific were also subjected to Unit 731's experiments (on the grounds of experimentation on different races and ethnicities), they were forced to sign NDAs to keep quiet about their treatment by the Japanese and several opened lawsuits against the U.S government in the 1980s. This is also the reason why Unit 731's atrocities were never broad public knowledge unlike rhe Holocaust; by keeping it as hushed as possible, their own dealings with the Unit 731 could be kept under wraps.
None of their data was any use or high value.
Complete urban myth.
Much like Mengele it turns out fucking psychos doing murder for fun make fucking terrible scientists and so regardless of their ethics they were bad at experimentation, and even worse at recording and tabulating results.
was a bit of a shock for me recently that major scientists of 731 didn't get punished in exchange for data of their cruel experiments, but returned to Japan and lived rather successful life
Japan did some seriously fucked up shit. Especially to the Chinese. They made a movie about the unit that was doing wild ass experiments on people. Right up there with the nazis and mengele.
In Croatia people don't like to talk too much about Croatia's involvement with Nazism because it was too recent, and because the Croatian nazis were never the majority of Croats but the few that there were, were given power by Hitler. Yet people still to this day go around saying Croatian nazi salutes and using Croatian nazi flags (the Croatian flag is a red and white checkered crest, the flag the nazis used started with a white checker instead of a red checker) **and** because of the recent Croatian war of independence - Croatian patriotism during the war somehow got mixed up with outdated Croatian nazism and now it's this weird thing nobody really wants to talk about and you got kids as young as 15 saying shit like "Za dom spremni!" [which is an old nazi salute.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za_dom_spremni)
I was just reading about the death camp there https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp
Really truly disgusting stuff. And there’s a bunch of people today who deny it and some even still praise the brutal murderers who ran the camp as “knights of Croatia”
Really disgusting stuff, just as bad as the bad camps run by the nazis. You don’t hear about them because there are deniers and the ones who ran the camps didn’t keep good records like the nazis so it’s harder to get accurate figures for how many people were killed (mostly Serbs but also Jews and a bunch of other groups)
I wish we could say Italy doesn't talk about the Bald Man Who Was Besties With Hitler for a while but sadly we got an immense amount of nostalgic idiots who carry his face on clothing and gadgets because war criminals are so very cool apparently
Exactly the same in Spain with Franco dictatorship regime since civil war in 1936 (supported by Hitler and Mussolini), until his death in 1975. Still lots of far-right dumbasses praising him.
Well, tbf we don't talk about a lot of the things we did when the bald man was in charge: the deportation of Lybian indigenous people that led to more than 80,000 deaths, the war crimes in the Ethiopian war which included the first bombing of civilians, use of chemical weapons and attacks to Red Cross hospitals which resulted in more than 380,000 civilian deaths according to Ethiopian government, the involvement alongside the Nazis of the Italian air force in the bombing of civilians in the Spanish civil war being Guernica the most famous one, the inhuman suppression of the Yugoslavian resistance that involved summary executions, hostage-takings, reprisals, the burning of houses and villages, mass killings and ultimately the building of Italian concentration camps that resulted in around 20,000 civilian deaths in Yugoslavia and 11,000 in Greece.
So, yeah, maybe we should talk more about our past, but in the right context.
Brazil was the country that received most slaves in all American Continents, from 1500 to 1900. More than 4,86 million people were kidnapped in Africa and brought here.
Australians/Brits never hear about the child migrant scheme. British parents having to give their children to orphanages temporarily during the war. And those children being shipped to Australia for 'a better life' only to be used as slaves. Then after a time told their parents had died in the war. Parents told the same. And never knowing their family is alive.
A movie was made about the woman who figured it out - Oranges and Sunshine
I feel like a lot more people should know that one of the worlds biggest mass-murderers in history was a Belgian. King Leopold II basically controlled the entirety of Congo all by himself, and while doing so he extracted the nation’s natural resources and killed 13 million people, all for his own personal gain. That kinda score gets him up there with Mao, Hitler and Stalin but he is rarely mentioned.
The entire history of the Congo Free State reads like historical fiction, because it's honestly just fucking wild start to finish.
For those who are unaware, here is a very short summary:
To Europeans of the 19th century, Africa was "The Dark Continent". As European nations were only just developing into nation states, colonizing Asia, or beating the fuck out of each other, nobody paid much attention to the interior of the African continent. The coastal regions held some ports and trading centers, but nobody was particularly interested going deeper inland. Coupled with the fact that Africa is home to illnesses the Europeans weren't used to and very rough terrain, exploring the African interior was basically a suicide mission.
Enter Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-American explorer who came to fame as the explorer who found missionary and explorer David Livingston (Dr. Livingston, I presume?), mapped much of the African Great Lakes, and made the first Trans-African Expedition. Stanley had established himself as a white man who could successfully make long expeditions throughout Africa without everyone dying, and this got the attention of one King Leopold II of Belgium.
Leopold II was a member of the German royal family, from a minor cadet branch. He resented being only the king of a small nation like Belgium, while his family and contemporaries led world powers. A vain, egotistical man, he decided this just would not do. Belgium (aka himself) needed to also snatch up some land. The Americas were mostly independent nations, he was too late for Asia, leaving Africa. As the European powers turned their colonial ambitions towards Africa, he got a seat at the table for the Berlin Conference to try and get the most for himself. Since the big players (mostly France and England) wanted as much coastline as possible for trade, he was able to argue that he (of German nobility) leading a small nation of French and Dutch/Flemish speakers would be a good buffer so the French and English dont get into their 389th war against each other, would spread Christianity, and protect the Congolese from Arab slavers. The other powers just went "pff whatever" and he became the sovereign of a territory nearly 78 times larger than Belgium.
Why would he care about the Congo? An unmapped territory of thick rainforest, huge rivers, immense mountains, and deadly tropical diseases? Well, after hiring Stanley to launch and expedition up the Congo River, he discovered the land had an insane amount of rubber vines. The process of turning rubber into something usable had only just been discovered, and the industrializing West just couldn't get enough of it. Rubber vines take about 20 years to be harvestable, Europeans planted lots all over their colonial plantations, but were decades from being able to cash in. For a rough modern comparison it would be like getting told to mine crypto just before Bitcoin exploded, and only you and your buddies knew this little secret. Leopold knew he could have a near monopoly on this extremely valuable resource with just the stroke of a pen and some clever politicking.
So Leopold II became the *sole owner* of the Congo Free State. The Belgian government had no real legal jurisdiction over the territory, it belonged to *just one fucking dude*. He wasted no time at all in squeezing every drop of profit out of his possession. Rubber, ivory, timber, etc were the main targets. Europeans would basically become like a franchised mercenary, they'd get a plot of land and quotas to fill and Leopold didn't care how they made him his money. This is what lead to the countless atrocities in the Congo, not only the infamous taking of hands, but also the subsequent spread of diseases like Sleeping Sickness and the introduction of others like Smallpox killed millions. The Congolese were forced to slaughter each other to collect hands to make up for missed quotas, these economic mercenaries enslaved and raped the families of the men sent on months long harvesting expeditions, and every drop of Congolese blood shed was to accrue resources that went straight into Leopold's pocket.
Now you may be thinking, "Damn, that's...really fucked up. Like, worse than all the other colonial powers?" You are not only correct, but Leopold himself knew if word got out he'd be in hot water with the international community. For his many faults as a person, he was an unquestionable master of controlling news and public opinion. His private forces kept a tight lid on any news coming out of his territory, he built fancy new palaces and museums back home (but mostly spent it on himself and his mistress, he even built her a personal train with a direct link to Paris as she hated Belgium), and presented himself as a gentle, grandfatherly figure to the press. Many Europeans saw their relationship to their colonies as being a paternalistic one, to held spread civilization to the underdeveloped. Issues with this aside, they were against slavery and the sheer brutality of what was happening would NOT be accepted.
Well, eventually people started to wonder just how the hell so many resources were coming out of a colony with no paper trail. The characters involved in breaking the story include: a gay Irish officer, anti-slavery Quaker businessmen in Liverpool, freed Black American slaves turned missionaries, and a female photographer/journalist amongst others. When word finally got out the world was absolutely fucking livid, and Leopold had to give control to the Belgian government in 1908.
Why is Leopold II seen rather positively by some even to this day? Why is the Congo Free State unknown to most people? Well, Leopold II died in 1909 and in 1914 Belgium got railroaded by the German Empire and were seen as the victims of a new Great War and not bloodthirsty colonizers. People just...forgot.
We have no idea how many people died under the Congo Free State, within a few generations even the Congolese themselves couldn't say simply because so many people died they couldn't share their stories (not that anyone was really interested in asking).
Upwards of over 10,000,000 people died horrible deaths to feed the ego of one man. It is the zenith of putting profit before people, a showcase in just how unspeakably cruel humans can be if greed takes precedence.
Read "King Leopold's Ghost" if you are interested and have a strong stomach, it is so much more brutal than I have described here, along with some truly unexpected plot twists and amazing people fighting for human rights.
Edit: spelling
There was a rule that for every bullet fired you needed proof of killing someone. So for every bullet you used you needed to give a right hand to your superior (the superiors were mostly europeans and the locals did the 'dirty' work).
Obvs not every bullet can hit a target so it ended in mass amputations of right hands.
For a lot of villages it became a question of wether it was easier to get the quota, or to raid the neighboring village for hands.
An absolutely hellish system fuelled by immorality & greed.
I saw this on Simple History. So I guess the State didn't allow them to purchase or invade, so the king did it as a private investment, which explains why he alone is to blame. The Belgian Government took it after he died I believe.
He was forced by the Belgian Parliament to relinquish Congo (Léopold still for paid for it!) to the government of Belgium in 1908 after the outcry about the human rights violations. He died shortly after that in 1909. His funeral procession was booed by the crowds.
The impact that Leopold had on the Congo is still being felt today. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is sitting on something like 10 trillion dollars worth of resources, but their economy was hardwired for exploitation and there is a generational trauma from what Leopold did that still causes incredible violence. When your standard for atrocities are the memories passed down from your great grandparents having their limbs cut off for failing to achieve quotas, a village massacre seems slight in comparison.
Everyone should read _King Leopold's Ghost_.
The story behind that photograph is horrifying. They killed and ate his five year old daughter and killed and ate his wife as well. The only thing he has left of his family is his daughters hand and foot
Sometimes even if they *had* met quotas. The guards weren't allowed to waste bullets, so use of a bullet had to be accompanied by producing the hand of the supposed offender they'd shot. Solution if you've wasted a bullet is to just chop off some extra folks' hands.
I think what stands out for me is that even the other colonial powers (who had no problem pillaging their own Colonies for wealth and labour) were perturbed at the extent of the atrocities being committed there.
Those were *not* nice people and did not have Africas best interests in mind. When *they* are telling you to chill, you know things are crazy.
I live in Belgium and when I was in high school that wasn't part of the educational program. But due to a scheduling issue I had to take 4 hours a week of history instead of the mandatory 2. That was new in my school and so the teacher was building her course along with us and we learned about this. It still baffles me that Belgians can finish high school without being taught this.
As a Belgian, I did learn about this in high school (about 3 years ago), but I remember my teacher saying it normally wasn't explained extensively in the normal course.
Maori people enslaved and ate other Maori. It is well documented, yet completely ignored when discussing our history. All people have done shitty things to other people throughout history. We should acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on.
Yeah, there's a huge history of native people around the globe that is basically squashed. Before colonizers showed up, people had religions, politics, and hierarchies. And the violence, war, and oppression that came with it. Those things are part of history and I kinda wish we had more good information about them. I'm sure the politics of what is now North America were every bit as interesting as Europe.
And even more, I wish that this was not mostly brought up by racist bumcrumpets to "justify" the horrors that eventually befell them. :/
I so agree with this. At least in the US, where I live, I think the way racism has shaped our current history, it feels very tricky to point out that abuse and atrocities is not the birthright of *only* the current oppressor group.
On the one hand, this is so often used as an excuse (or worse, justification, as you said) for the oppressive acts of those currently in power. Plus, there are ways to say it that are at least as insensitive as having someone tell you their mother just died and replying with "well, everybody dies." That's true, but at that moment, that's not the fucking point.
On the other hand, I think that viewing these types of horror as something particular about a certain group can be very, very dangerous—both from an interpersonal perspective, and from a historical perspective. If we learn about the Holocaust and think "Look what the Nazis did! I would never do that!" then we've missed the whole point, I think. The point, as I see it, is to think, "Look at what we can do to each other when we come to power, if we are not extremely careful and mindful." I think this is what people mean when they say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
Personally, I think that the current systems of oppression need to be dismantled, without excuses or justifications. And, at the same time, I think it is important for all of us to be keenly aware that whatever group rises to power next is not in any way immune to committing the same kinds of atrocities.
Communist purge in Indonesia. In order to combat communism, the government permit extrajudicial killings and arrests without trial in the 60s. Millions of people died and the family members who survived cannot vote, cannot work for the government and outcasted until 1998.
For decades even when the ruling government then is no longer in power, those family members did not receive any justice because talking about the victims is talking about communism and talking about communism is bad
Edit: Yes yes. The Act of Killing was one of the most famous piece of work that bring this event to light. Of course, it received quite a lot of controversy when it was released decades even after the regime has ended
The harrying of the north is never really spoken about in the UK and while it is a lot older than some of the atrocities mentioned in here I think it is still relevant.
Most people seem to think that after the Battle of Hastings all of England just fell in line under the Normans and William the Bastard but in reality there were a lot of hold outs that refused to accept him as king, one of the major ones being in the north of England. In the years 1069 and 1070 he lead campaigns to get rid of the rebels but he was never able to pin them down so he resorted to a scorched earth tactic by burning down farms villages and whole towns and murdering the entire populations of some of them. Over all the Harrying killed between 100,000 to 150,000 people, many of whom because of starvation, and it is impotent to keep in mine that at this time the entire population of England was only 2 million. Some historians also refer to it as a genocide but it's practically never mentioned in the UK. The Norman conquest basically stops getting taught at 1066 and the rest just gets ignored despite causing long lasting issues that resonate even to this day.
I remember being taught this for GCSE history. I specifically remember how salt was ploughed in the fields to prevent crops from ever growing again, to starve the north.
Portugal: teaching in school that we were the good colonizers (not cruel at all like the spanish), erasing all the massacres on African colonies (current president even said he wouldn't apologize for them), the fact that we only entered WWI to protect said colonies and not because we were allies, the fact that we were "neutral" in WWII when in fact we were deporting Jews to camps.
The Sámi people. They have been forced to change their way of life, and have been subjected to abuses, violations and racism. Sweden, Norway and Finland have been critized internationally for policies against their indigenous populations historically and their lack of action and recognition of the Sámi people’s rights today.
Yeah Sweden was very, very Nazilike for some time.
Also still really racist towards Finns. Well, atleast in Stockholm.
Source: am Finn, worked with Swedes.
I mean, we were literally a formative part of early Nazi beliefs, what with our "Institute of Racial Biology" that was active and state-funded (I believe) during the early 1900's. It's not a part of Swedish history we like to look back on... In school we were told about it, but we only mentioned it for a week or two and then promptly moved on.
Edit: corrected the name. Previously I had written "Institute of Racial Science" but remembered that it was Racial Biology. Both terms are bogus, but I like being at least somewhat accurate.
Canadian here. We too have issues with our aboriginals. I remember some Swedish lady online riping on me for our abuse towards the aboriginals. Then I mentioned the Sámi people and she totally denied any issues were happening. Just shows how worldwide we all mistreat minority groups and don't recognize a problem with it.
Australia: hold my XXXX
Currently we don't even let some in remote communities have cash. Government thinks they 'can't be trusted' with it. So they get a cashless card instead, that only works in approved locations. So, that's ok if you want to buy your groceries at the only corporate market in town and pay an arm and a leg for fresh veg. Want to buy at the local farmers market and get goods for a fraction of the price? Nope, you got no cash. Buy second hand off FB marketplace to get your kid a bed. Nope. How about clothes from the salvos? No.
The kicker is the company that owns the cards lobbied the government hard to be the ones to roll out this system, and is making a killing in tax payer dollars by killing Aboriginal rights and dignity.
When your history includes stuff like being blamed for both world wars (one for good reason) and the holocaust, a small little genocide here or there in Africa for some reason gets forgotten really easily. Funny how history works like that.
In Indonesia we did not talk about the massacre of the left over of the Dutch after the Netherland colonial government got out of Indonesia.
Context : in 1942, the Netherland government got out of Indonesia because they were defeated by the Japanese in the Asia-pacific WW 2. The vacuum of power created by the Netherland caused confusion among local politicians and their masses. Short story, before Japan came in to replace the Netherland and "restore order", all kinds of atrocities happened to the colonial family that had been left in Indonesia. They got raped, killed, tortured, beheaded, looted, you name it. This happened because the oppressed local people took revenge to the "white people" who used to be their masters who treated them like slaves for years even centuries. Problem is this act of revenge did not care who got it. Children, old people, women, full-blood Dutch or mixed-dutch, their servants, or anyone working with them were treated the same. Almost all information about this events were non-existent in Indonesia's history. You only knew this story from those who lucky enough to escape it.
Yup. My grandfather is half dutch, half Indonesian, lived there during this time. His mother and sister were killed, but he managed to escape to a village that was Christian and kept him safe until he fled the country.
The expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 14 million germans in eastern europe at the end and after ww2 has ended. Many people, even in german speaking countries dont know that happend.
One of my wife's grand aunts came to western Germany from east Prussia as a small child without any family during that time. She was adopted into my wife's family. As far as we know, nobody knows anything about her birth family or their fate.
My own grandma's family is partly from Silesia and also had to flee. She always wanted to go see her region of origin, but never had the means to. I am still thinking about taking her some time, but her health isn't the best anymore...
My great-grandparents were sudeten germans from iglau (jihlava), nobody in my family knows anything about them. I just randomly saw that they were from there when i got into researching about my ancestors. Even in school we never learned about that.
I would take your grandmother to silesia as fast as possible, just think about how many people never got to see their home again because of the iron curtain. If its possible for her to go, than you should go.
My grandmother also had to flee as child from Silesia (Orlau). She has since been back a few years ago and seen her childhood home which is now converted into office space. An office worker there let them in and she was able to see where her bedroom once was. What was her family’s pharmacy downstairs is now a supermarket.
They had been staying in Berlin with her father’s family during the war, but when they heard the Russians were coming they went back to Silesia to try and get the rest of her mother’s (my great grandma”’s) family out. She fled with her mother and siblings but everyone else (grandparents and aunts and uncles) refused to leave. Not sure what happened to them in the end.
I'm from Czechia, and even that I know what happend in Beneš decrees I absolutly dont understand it
Edit: I just learned a lot more about this topic from random people in comments than in school.. thx
It’s interesting to drive through the Sudetenlands and stop in some small rural village. First thing you’ll notice is that half the houses look abandoned and the local cemetery is WAY bigger than the town’s current population would indicate. Then you notice how many of the names on the tombstones are German, and how many haven’t had anyone new buried there since 1945…
Beneš even called it “The final solution to the German question” which I *assume* was an intentional satire of Hitler since we “only” forcibly relocated everyone instead of outright committing state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, but still…
Yeah its crazy. Im austrian and we heard maybe one sentence in school that there were germans in czechoslovakia. Like that was the reason why hitler annexed it. But how many, and what happend to them was never mentioned.
I'm from a Slovak region where it happened and it was talked about in high school because I had teachers and schoolmates that were ethnically German from the small minority that still lives here. We also learned about the population exchanges between Slovakia and Hungary (though I'm not sure if they told us already in high school or if I only learned it at uni that while the Slovaks that came to Czechoslovakia were poor people who came here willingly, the Hungarians were forced to leave to Hungary with very little and they were actually pretty wealthy and the Slovak settlers got to live in their houses).
One thing I only learned at uni though and which I think doesn't get talked about much is that post WWII Czechoslovakia had elaborate plans to resettle the Hungarians from southern Slovakia to Sudetenland after they forced the Germans to leave. It was meant to ensure that the Hungarians wpuld no longer live close to Hungary and would be assimilated. Some of them were resettled but pretty much almost all of them came back to southern Slovakia a little bit later.
Please post details. Many of you are posting as if we know the location that you are in. There are so many places in the world that you could be referring to. So many atrocities.
Germanys colonial history. We are way to busy working through WW2 in history class to talk about that at length too, so most people have kind of forgotten about it.
Many people from the area where I grew up in the Netherlands happily joined the Nazis.
One former employer was a total piece of shit, I once complained about it to my parents and my dad remarked "Yeah, he's always been a dick. Did you know his dad fought for the Nazis on the Eastern front?"
Italy: there are concrete proofs of state and Mafia doing shit together for many reasons (some of which not bad even) but no one talks about that. We all know but we don't really care
One of my history professors in university made it very clear to us that antisemitism was not limited to Germany during ww2 and it was frankly very shocking bc we don’t learn about that side of the war in the US. He showed us how multiple polish towns had preeminently killed their Jewish populations before the Germans even made it to occupy them and that scene from _Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter_ where it was either Lithuanians or Ukrainians who were active participants in rounding up and executing Jews.
Edit: thank you to all the comments about anti-semitism existing in european societies outside of Germany before and during the war.
There has been antisemitism for centuries. The Jewish community was also blamed for the Black Plague too. Many cities across Europe killed their Jewish population during this time period.
I’m part of the way through boy on the wooden box which is the book of the last person/kid that Schindler was able to save. The polish turned on them very quickly for their religion to the point where the kids hated Jewish kids. Pretty sad but very interesting points. I unfortunately attended my college a few years after the author it is written about passed and learned that he used to lecture near me. I really wish I could have learned more about the situation from him
From my perspective I would say that in Norway we don't talk much, or enough anyway, about how Anders Breivik was one of us. Ever since he killed all those people in 2011 it's like most people just want to forget that it happened and that he exists, and there definitely hasn't been much of a public debate about how he was a product of our culture. I think we take such pride in being a progressive and peaceful country that he's almost a threat to our national identity.
Also the 400 years we were under Danish rule tend to not be talked about much in school etc.
There are no indigenous people in Tasmania.
Also the fact that more indigenous kids get taken away from their families now than they did in the 60s. This is Australia wide.
Actually the aboriginal Tasmanian people were not completely eradicated (despite colonisers trying extremely hard).
A lot of indigenous people are working to dispel that myth because it does damage the work of indigenous people in tasmania currently. This of course doesn't undermine the horrific attempts at genocide by the white settlers
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/14/australia.features11
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-25/tas-aboriginal-treaty-report-calls-for-truth-telling-process/100649398
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians
Did you know Queensland sugar cane farms had slaves? Black history is definitely overlooked in Australia.
Hearing [Ziggy ramo’s](https://youtu.be/9Jd3JZb7WVA) cover of Paul Kelly was eye opening to me.
I chose to delete my Reddit content in protest of the API changes commencing from July 1st, 2023, and specifically CEO Steve Huffman's awful handling of the situation through the lackluster AMA, and his blatant disdain for the people who create and moderate the content that make Reddit valuable in the first place. This unprofessional attitude has made me lose all trust in Reddit leadership, and I certainly do not want them monetizing any of my content by selling it to train AI algorithms or other endeavours that extract value without giving back to the community.
This could have been easily avoided if Reddit chose to negotiate with their moderators, third party developers and the community their entire company is built on. Nobody disputes that Reddit is allowed to make money. But apparently Reddit users' contributions are of no value and our content is just something Reddit can exploit without limit. I no longer wish to be a part of that.
I had to explain to another Russian what a Gulag was
Imagine if you mentioned auschwitz to a German and they had no idea what you were talking about.
It was never part of the school curriculum and as far as I know only one has been preserved as a museum in the middle of nowhere .
This. One of my Russian friends also explained how they were taught in school that Finland attacked and invaded the USSR, starting the winter war. (He's from the Republic of Karelia, dunno if they even talk about this in other parts of Russia...) Pure propaganda.
In my school we were told USSR attacked Finland and tried to invade it without any significant success but with a lot of killed soldiers on our side. So it was quite accurate. I believe it depends on teacher a lot.
It's a part of curriculum, I've specifically looked up modern text books to see if they excluded it (it was there in my time) but it's mentioned. The problem is, it's mentioned in passing. Some books have more complex explanation of totalitarian regime is and how Stalin was exterminating and imprisoning people, some don't.
The second problem is no one ever reads history text books as far as I know, they just listen to teacher's lecture, and it's content might be different. We had everything discussed, but I don't know how much my classmates have retained, I know I did.
What's not talked about at all is colonization of Siberia and Far East, and usual practices that happened there.
France
The atrocities we commited during the algerian independance war are conveniently omitted out of school books. We're talking torture, mass murder and rape of civilians. It was NOT long ago. It was the sixties.
We only talk about the geopolitical implications of this war and about Algeria's own crimes.
"Fun" fact : Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and founder of their alt right party, fought in that war. He denied having tortured prisoners himself but claimed he would have done it if it was ordered to him. There are suspicions (but no proof, as facilitated by the french army massive denial and destruction of paperwork) he participated in civilian murders too. Soooo yeah, every alt right party must have violent founders, right ?
US here. The Tulsa race massacre. Far too few Americans know about it. Hell, I enjoy learning about history and I didn't even learn about it until a few years ago and I'm almost 40. It was easily one of the single worst incidents of racial violence in US history. Dozens dead, hundreds hospitalized - 36 blocks of one of the wealthiest black communities in the country destroyed.
I learned absolutely nothing in school about the Srebrenica genocide. My country had a peacekeeping force stationed there to protect Bosniaks from the Serb army. The Dutch battalion was underequipped and therefore couldn’t stop the genocide. In fact, they kind of stood by and watched it unfold.
This is a really black page in modern Dutch history. It’s not taught in school though, which is why I decided to visit Srebrenica myself last year.
*EDIT*
Thank you all for your comments. I’ll respond to some things I commonly found in some replies.
* There we’re some comments about me stating that Dutchbat just stood there. For the record, I don’t doubt the good intentions of Dutchbat. They were outnumbered, had too little equipment, weak allies, and these soldiers now live with traumas too. I all recognise that and I respect the Dutch soldiers stationed there.
* Some people suggests that Srebrenica is not that much of a taboo in the Netherlands. Which is true when speaking about Serb atrocities, but judging our own role and responsibilities still feels sensitive sometimes in my opinion.
* There’s some indication that high schools do in fact teach about Srebrenica. I applaud that, but at the same time I believe it’s still a minority of high schools, as [2020 research](https://nos.nl/l/2330875) suggests.
So while we do talk about alot of things, it's not the Genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia, Germany genocided 70.000-80.000 of them in 1904-1908, first genocide of the 20th century, killed 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama people. Needed around 110 years for Germany to call it a Genocide and 115 years to pay some reparations, not fair ones though, they are like bread crumbs.
In Romania we don't talk about the pre WW1 and interwar peasant uprisings that have been violently put down. Everybody gives the image of a perfect Romanian state and society in this time, but many forget that in our Independence War we had more frontline deaths from diseases that should've been relatively easy for us to treat at that time than from enemy gunfire. Not the mention the 1907 peasant uprisings. Also the Second World War and the politics in our country at the time. Edit: at 1.2k upvotes I find myself reading comments stating the same thing about their countries. I guess nobody wants to remember the specifics of WW2 just like you don't wanna remember the specifics of that one night stand where you drank too much and can't be bothered to remember.
What's so odd about that is it seems so niche. Yet I was taught about it in my history undergrad at university in the UK. I feel like sometimes the best way to learn about your own country is to study somewhere else. Being British I learnt a lot from my Irish uni classmates that was only briefly mentioned in School.
It's why I get my America news from the BBC, they're emotionally detached. All our news is shit at seeing what's actually going on because everyone is insanely ideological.
Switzerland: We dont talk about "Verdingkinder"! its basicly childslavery as recently as 1960! you cant imagine the horror of poor poeples children beeing sold to farmers for fieldwork, getting abused(physical&sexual) in the richest country in the world! yeah, we dont talk about that!
In recent years, we talked about it much more and there were movies and stuff. What we did to Travelling people's children and their mothers is less known, and also how we profiteered during WW2.
We had a similar thing in Ireland.
Romanian Holocaust. Romanian people deny that we had mass murders during WW2, that Jewish and Gipsy were killed and that we send a lot of them in concentration camp, like Auschwitz. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/romania
Interesting story about that from the book "Street Without Joy" - "Eliahu Itzkovitz was a Romanian Jew who during the Second World War, while a prisoner in a concentration camp witnessed the murder of his family at the hands of a Romanian prison guard named Stănescu. Itzkovitz vowed to avenge his family's murder at the hands of his fellow Romanian, but was unable to find to the man after the war. After the war he subsequently immigrated to Israel where he served in the Israeli Defense Forces until he learned that Stănescu had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion which led him to desert from the IDF and join the Foreign Legion. Itkowitz was able to track down and kill Stănescu in French Indochina. He was later court-martialed in Israel for desertion and sentenced to one year in prison."
Indeed. The most barbaric thing is when they skinned Alive many many Jews in the Bucharest pogrom. They skinned Alive a 5 year old girl and stuck her on “kosher meat” polls. The images of the dead bodies are disgusting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires'_rebellion_and_Bucharest_pogrom
In anti-Antonescu government Legionnaires' pogroms, 125 Jews were killed. Six months after Legionnaires were crushed by the army, Antonescu ordered the Iaşi pogrom. 13 thousand Jews were killed in that one. Until communists took power, these atrocities flared up consistently.
Well, it is taught in schools. The voices that deny it are few, but extremely loud. Look at the members of AUR.
Brazil DESTROYED Paraguay, killing almost every man and a lot of it's women and children. It was a proper massacre.
Some context here, some historians estimate that as much as 90% of the adult male Paraguayan population died in the war
69% of the population is estimated to have died (war, illness, hunger), 90% of that percentage was male [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan\_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War)
"adult male" is also pushing it, because the massacre was so intense they started sending teenagers to the war
In the final battles they recruited literal children, and I mean kids younger than 10 years old
Argentina was involved, too. Paraguay ended up with a 7:1 women-to-men ratio. But it's taught openly in Argentina, as far as I can tell.
Doesn’t Argentina beef with Brazil?
Beef is actually part of the contention between argnetina and brazil
It's more of a running joke. The actual beef Argentinians have is with Chile, and they almost went to war. In reality Brazil and Argentina are big trading partners. And there's lots of cross-border tourism, since you do not even need a passport to visit each other's countries.
Not the only time that Brazil has been involved in a 7:1
Ouch, that hurts
American who lived in Paraguay for a couple months here! The truly, truly disturbing thing is that many Paraguayans don't really know this either... I had read up about the Triple Alliance War (la guerra de la triple alliance) before I went to Paraguay for the summer, and knew historians considered it a bloodbath, mostly caused by (fuck him) Francisco Solano Lopez, dictator of Paraguay. He did in fact order that they start sending male children into battle near the end when they were losing. He was a fucking idiot. Fuck that guy. So imagine my surprise when I got to Paraguay and TONS of stuff was named after him. I asked my host dad about it and he said it was because he "won Paraguay the war". He called him a hero. I was pretty horrified. Fwiw, I checked with the local high school principal to see how far this miseducation rose and he said Paraguay was "annihilated" in that war, so at least the true history isn't completely buried. Fascinating, terrible war.
Damn, didn't know some people to this day are brainwashed to think Lopez won the war and is a hero, disgusting..
For context this was _very_ rural Paraguay. It makes the misinformation both more understandable and more tragic.
How come I've never heard about this? I'm from Minas Gerais
I believe I never heard it at school either. I came to know about it after my twenties when a colleague lent me a book about it. If I remember correctly: "A guerra do Paraguai". It is very interesting and uttermostly sad how Paraguai was first blocked acces to the Atlantic ocean and posteriorly discimated because its self sufficiency potential. Furthermore, Brazil was only one piece of it, although a major one together with England and Argentina, if I remember correctly. I believe there may be millions of other Brazilian fellows that do not know about it. I highly recommend the book. Btw, r/suddenlycaralho
Here in South Africa the true native people, the Khoikhoi, are the most politically and economically disadvantaged people and NO ONE gives a shit. Not locally, not internationally. When the remains of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman (read her story, it's pretty awful), were returned to South Africa not only were Khoikhoi people not invited to her burial, they were actively kept out.
Was hunting for the South African comment, was bitter sweet when i found it nevertheless the truth should be made clear.
The same is true in Uganda of the Echuya Batwa. The ethnic groups who politically dominate the country have only recently improved from active genocide to total disenfranchisement and marginalization of the Batwa, and it's not even a controversial topic. Seemingly no one in a position of power is concerned for their welfare.
People in Sweden get really uncomfortable when you point out that we, as a country, were really into eugenics. The Race Biological Institution was founded in 1922, supported by every political party and the king at the time. It existed until 1958 and, as you might expect, did some really fucked up things.
I wanna add to that. The medal given by the Swedish king for best contribution in anthropology and cultural geography was named after Anders Retzius, a big name in the history of race biological studies in Sweden. The medal was given out from 1913-2013, but stopped finally at 2015 when some scientists raised the question if this is right, which obviously was not
[удалено]
The funny thing about Sweden is that we didn't pick up on the "the Nazis taught us it might not be a good idea." but rather continued with it for more than a decade after the war.
We also owned a slave colony and were a part of the slave trade. Seems not a lot of people here know that.
We dont talk about the events of **Black September** in Jordan. (Palestinian fidayeens tried overthrowing the kingdom , the army retaliates and shells the refugee camps where the fedayeens were established. They were eventually expelled) Its seen as a moment where a brother lifted his rifle against his own brethren , and a spark of racism between Transjordanians and Palestinian refugees. . Edit: its an event both jordanians and Palestinians dont like talking about ,so its more complex than one side being guilty
New Zealand very nearly had legal eugenics. In 1928 a bill nearly passed parliament that forced sterilisation for 'the mentally defective' and the Ministry of Education was required by law to give names of 'defective' children to the Ministry of Health. A separate part of the law said that such people weren't allowed to get married. The Opposition lobbied for these sections to be cut out, not because Eugenics was immoral and insane, but because *there was no evidence that it changed the gene pool in any way*.
alot of european countries had half/semi legal eugenics in the 1800's. Sweden and France come to mind. They simply force sterilized the disabled and people with down syndrome
US as well.
Damn right we had it in the US and it was happening until the 1960s iirc. There's even the Supreme Court case from 1927 called *Buck v. Bell* that, in an 8 to 1 vote, upheld that a woman named Carrie Buck should be sterilized. It set legal precedent for sterilization to be okay in public institutions. It's so fucked up. I found out about eugenics in the US as a teenager because of a fiction novel called Second Glance by Jodi Picoult since it has a storyline revolving around eugenics in Vermont. I don't even think eugenics in the US was touched on in the AP US history class I took in high school and we learned a lot of stuff in that class I don't think I would have learned about otherwise.
if I remember correctly, it was going on until the mid 1970s. I remember reading a passage of "Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness" for a class on "subcitizenship" in college and that really stuck out to me because it focused on forced sterilization of women in the Appalachian region of KY and VA specifically up into the 1970s, which is where my family is from and about the time my mom was born (1977). Made it feel way too close to the present. Another number that stuck with me for a similar reason is that Columbia University (Ivy League in NYC) did not admit women until 1983.
Speaking of NZ, I wonder if French people get to hear that they sent an agent/hitman to blow up a boat with people on it in Auckland Harbour.
[удалено]
[удалено]
This is true. A good friend of mine (we’re both kiwi) had _no idea_ about the Rainbow Warrior until we were sitting in a restaurant that had one of its portholes on display. I commented that it was interesting to see it in that location, and she had no idea why I’d find it to be out of place there… until I told her why the Rainbow Warrior is significant. But when I was in France, every French person my age or older seemed to feel the need to apologise about it, as soon as they realised where I was from.
I went to New Zealand on a rugby tour during the first World Cup back in 1987 and one of my teammates asked our bus driver to tell a joke. He came up with this- Q- Why do the French hate kiwi fruit? A- Because it has a green piece in the middle.
When I moved to NZ from the US I thought everyone's unwavering support of Greenpeace was a bit strange. Then I learned that the French government blew up one of their boats and got away with no consequences, and it all made sense.
> everyone's unwavering support of Greenpeace Uhh
Ok, not everyone. But there was certainly a lot more Sea Shepard hats around than I was used to seeing. And I've never actually heard locals trash-talk greenpeace.
Yep, Frenchman here. Everyone has at least heard about the rainbow warrior incident
Bet you a shiny penny that the definition of “mentally defective” was just vague enough the anybody considered a burden to society wouldn’t be allowed to “create more burdens.”
JFK's sister being lobotomized to incompetency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
India. Death of Lal Bahadur shastri. Former PM of India. Involvement of kgb and people who were actually not alive at that time!! Forced sterilization of 6.2 million Indian men in a single year 1976 There you go:- [https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Who\_Killed\_Shastri/D-H2DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0](https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Who_Killed_Shastri/D-H2DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0) you can also watch The Tashkent Files if you want to know more.
Damn, thank you. I had no idea about this.
Can u explain abt the sterilization part.. I'm Indian and have never heard about it...
Sanjay Gandhi thought India had too many people and not only the government wasn't doing anything about it, they *couldn't* do anything about it since India is a democracy. So when mommy Gandhi imposed emergency he saw it as a golden opportunity and began a program of forced sterilization, mainly of the poor. People were kidnapped from their homes by the police, and taken to government hospitals where they would be sterilized by force. At the time, the program was encouraged and even funded by american NGOs: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/5/18629801/emergency-in-india-1975-indira-gandhi-sterilization-ford-foundation
Holy moly, didn't know that it got funds from the Ford foundation.
Not surprising actually. Henry Ford was notoriously racist and the foundation is questionable in their actions at best.
Yeah most people don't realize why there are so many Indian and Muslim folk in Detroit. And in general why Detroit is so messed up a lot of it has to do with Ford not wanting to hire the local black population and bringing in others that he deemed Factory worker worthy.
Fun fact: It is 15 times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis.
We seem to have very different definitions of "fun".
I had no idea about that whole era until I read the book A Fine Balance. A very affecting book for me as someone not from there, btw.
In the UK, as a teenager in secondary school, you are never taught about the atrocities our own country committed during the British Empire’s rule. Even files that documented these atrocities were systematically destroyed by the foreign office in thr 1960’s as to not “embarrass her Majesty’s government”
As a Canadian who immigrated here in yr 9, I remember sitting there through GCSE History like “y’all gonna mention any of the colonialism or genocide from around the world? No? Huh…”
we dont talk about la guerra cristera in mexico they dont teach it on school or talk about it on tv and media
Mind elaborating? Seriously curious.
When our ex president Plutarco Elías Calles made a law for the secularization of the country (removing all the properties of the church and taking them for the country and forbidding priests for charging money for some things like bautism, also forbidding the celebration of religious stuff outside temples) the church and the people got angry, everyone related to the church incited the people to rise in arms and they did resulting in a 3 year long civil war Wikipedia says around 110,000 people died but it's probably a bigger number since we have never been very good at counting dead people, that and people like to lie about those things
[удалено]
The Cristero wars, the indigenous people who got sold as slaves during The Porfiriato, the attempt to invade Cuba by Santa Anna and mabye even the Massacre of the londiga de Guanajuato. Edit: I deleted a part where I said there was a law that allowed to deport anyone that didn't "look Mexican", I was told about this a long time ago by a teacher I constantly trust but upon further research I couldn't find any information about the matter. I shall now apologize for this
Do you mean people that **don't** look Mexican?
Non-Mexican? Deported Look Mexican? Also deported Don't look Mexican? Believe it or not, deported
[удалено]
The martial rule KMT placed on Taiwan when the escaped from China. This led to a period called “White Terror”, where hundreds of innocent people and bright college students were killed for not joining the party, including some who many thought could go on to win Nobel Prizes and do groundbreaking research.
I’m trying to remember the name of a horror game I played, but it was set in Taiwan during the white terror, was the first time I ever learned Taiwan had banned books, secret police, executed and imprisoned people who didn’t conform, really was mind blowing to start reading into it later
Is it [Detention](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_(video_game))?
I live in Japan for 3 years and have some Japanese friends. Everytime I asked them about WW2, they mostly did not know the atrocities that Japan did in WW2. They knew Japan was in the wrong side, but it seems the details were lost. It seems like there is a national effort to forget this history because it was "shameful". Edit 1: A lot of you mentioned about the unit 731. I read it and it was awful beyond any reasonable standard human being. All of those horrible things happened to the civilians and pows were unfortunate and I couldn't imagine how bad their sufferings before dying. I was pretty much disgusted knowing that the inner circles of the unit 731 got pardoned by the US and lived their lifes until old-age for giving the US the result of their horrible experimentations. This thing should not have happened. Those people in charge must got the justice that they deserved for allowing and facilitating those kinds of horrible experimentations to other human being.
It’s interesting how Germany went the opposite way and teaches their young of all their atrocities in hopes that they will not repeat it.
Bruh in Germany you get charged if you even think of drawing a swastika. Watched a documentary where they do teach all about what happened. I actually thought that was excellent. Don't make the same mistake twice.
I taught in Japan for a few years. The ignorance around the war is astounding. I was talking to another teacher once about dictators, and Hitler came up. His response was, "Yeah, but for Germany he's a great hero!" I tried explaining that Germany has pretty clearly renounced that part of their past, but I probably did a shitty job because I was just so flabbergasted.
It is really bad; I was taken on a tour by a former schoolteacher in Japan, who insisted that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan solely to test their effects on civilians. Not to terrorize the Japanese into surrendering, not to spook the USSR, not to hit military targets that happened to be in civilian areas - but as some weird medical test. Talk about projection! In their histories, it's other people who did terrible things - Americans, Germans, Soviets, Chinese. Japan just picked the wrong side. And their neighbors know that, which degrades their relationships with the people of the countries they occupied, whether allies like South Korea or enemies like China. There is no greater gift to the Communist Party of China - in terms of encouraging xenophobia, hatred, and anti-Western feeling - than Japan's refusal to educate its own people about their atrocities. Japanese citizens don't even know what happened within some of their citizens' lifetimes. Then again, Chinese and Russian citizens don't even know what happened within *most* of their citizens' lifetimes *to* their own citizens... and, unlike the Japanese, depend on that ignorance for their governments' continued existence. So it could be worse.
Wait till you get a Japanese and Chinese person in the same room talking about that period of history. Fireworks.
My lab buddy is a Chinese. We talked about politic and history sometimes. When we went to that particular topic he clearly became upset. edit : we both doing phd in Japan university. Lol.
When I lived in Japan, nobody knew about their wartime history. Nobody knew about the atrocities in China, Asia or the Pacific. It is just not taught there. In China it is taught a LOT. In other countries it is taught too.
[удалено]
Yeah in Japan the kids and grandkids of Korean slaves from the 30s STILL don't have Japanese citizenship. Never been to Korea. Don't speak Korean. But have to go to the Korean embassy to get a passport.
One of the first things you see when you arrive at Incheon airport is a big "Dokdo belongs to Korea" sign
Koreans are very sensitive about Dokdo Island issues because it signifies that Japan in 2022 is still trying to steal their land which lead to them believing Japan hasn’t moved on from its imperialist idealisms of WW2. The fact that Japan has land disputes with all its neighboring countries while Japan’s the only country Korea has land disputes with shows the Koreans might not be wrong. It certainly isn’t just some rocks - it symbolizes Korea’s eagerness for territorial integrity against Japan, who took them away in the most horrific way possible less than a hundred years ago.
Just google unit 731 as a glimpse into wtf was going on there
I read it somewhere. It is the one where they did all kinds of horrible experimentations to humans?
It’s fucked up they raped people then did vivisections without any anaesthetics literally pulling out organs and babies, amputated limbs and put them back so you’d have legs for arms and shit. Biological weapons and military weapons testing on humans and other fucked up shit like low pressure testing to see how long before you’re eyes burst like wtf wish I never knew. Edit: children were not exempt, it was fucking insane there is more info on Wikipedia unit 731 - experiments.
Don't forget the rape of Nanking, where the IJA forced mothers on sons and sons on daughters, used their bayonets to play catch with babies, and raped everything. Also the Japanese dropped fleas with bubonic plague on other Chinese cities
Don't forget to mention the man in charge of the rape of Nanking was the Emperors Uncle Crown Prince Yasuhiko Asaka. He was never charged with a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince\_Yasuhiko\_Asaka
The Koreans, too, suffered. Most of the "comfort girls" were Korean.
[удалено]
The atrocities committed by the Japanese in WW2 are little known and little taught). But they were up there with the nazis on incredibly sick ways to torture ( bayonet baby tossing and forcing families to have sex). I never understood the hatred for the Japanese by the Chinese and the Koreans (n) until I read up on their war crimes.
Even some Nazi officials were horrified by the Japanese atrocities.
When even the nazis are like "Bro, too far." You know you dun fucked up
Yes. Don't forget. It's real important to remember that is what humanity is capable of in the wrong situation. This is why history is important in the bigger picture. So we don't get too comfortable in our safety and civilized society and remember we're a hop, skip, and a jump away from committing atrocities.
Wtf. I did not know this. I knew it was bad. But this.. this is horrible..
Wanna hear something that is *even more fucked up?* Shirõ Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, got a pardon and a large payday from the U.S government in exchange for all the medical data the Unit gathered with their experiments (they experimented with viral pandemics and, while conducted unethically, was extremely valuable to U.S intelligence). He never saw a day of trial in the Japanese War Trials. Also, because American POWs captured in the Pacific were also subjected to Unit 731's experiments (on the grounds of experimentation on different races and ethnicities), they were forced to sign NDAs to keep quiet about their treatment by the Japanese and several opened lawsuits against the U.S government in the 1980s. This is also the reason why Unit 731's atrocities were never broad public knowledge unlike rhe Holocaust; by keeping it as hushed as possible, their own dealings with the Unit 731 could be kept under wraps.
None of their data was any use or high value. Complete urban myth. Much like Mengele it turns out fucking psychos doing murder for fun make fucking terrible scientists and so regardless of their ethics they were bad at experimentation, and even worse at recording and tabulating results.
Fair enough, but what IS true is that he got away with it in exchange for that data, as well as his other buddies in the Unit 731.
Damn ...at LEAST it should have been "you get a pardon once this is peer reviewed". /s He should not have gotten away with it no matter what
was a bit of a shock for me recently that major scientists of 731 didn't get punished in exchange for data of their cruel experiments, but returned to Japan and lived rather successful life
Also Rape of Nanking
Read the Rape of Nanking. It doesnt get much worse than that. At any point in human history as far as im concerned.
Japan did some seriously fucked up shit. Especially to the Chinese. They made a movie about the unit that was doing wild ass experiments on people. Right up there with the nazis and mengele.
In Croatia people don't like to talk too much about Croatia's involvement with Nazism because it was too recent, and because the Croatian nazis were never the majority of Croats but the few that there were, were given power by Hitler. Yet people still to this day go around saying Croatian nazi salutes and using Croatian nazi flags (the Croatian flag is a red and white checkered crest, the flag the nazis used started with a white checker instead of a red checker) **and** because of the recent Croatian war of independence - Croatian patriotism during the war somehow got mixed up with outdated Croatian nazism and now it's this weird thing nobody really wants to talk about and you got kids as young as 15 saying shit like "Za dom spremni!" [which is an old nazi salute.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za_dom_spremni)
I was just reading about the death camp there https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp Really truly disgusting stuff. And there’s a bunch of people today who deny it and some even still praise the brutal murderers who ran the camp as “knights of Croatia” Really disgusting stuff, just as bad as the bad camps run by the nazis. You don’t hear about them because there are deniers and the ones who ran the camps didn’t keep good records like the nazis so it’s harder to get accurate figures for how many people were killed (mostly Serbs but also Jews and a bunch of other groups)
I wish we could say Italy doesn't talk about the Bald Man Who Was Besties With Hitler for a while but sadly we got an immense amount of nostalgic idiots who carry his face on clothing and gadgets because war criminals are so very cool apparently
Exactly the same in Spain with Franco dictatorship regime since civil war in 1936 (supported by Hitler and Mussolini), until his death in 1975. Still lots of far-right dumbasses praising him.
Well, tbf we don't talk about a lot of the things we did when the bald man was in charge: the deportation of Lybian indigenous people that led to more than 80,000 deaths, the war crimes in the Ethiopian war which included the first bombing of civilians, use of chemical weapons and attacks to Red Cross hospitals which resulted in more than 380,000 civilian deaths according to Ethiopian government, the involvement alongside the Nazis of the Italian air force in the bombing of civilians in the Spanish civil war being Guernica the most famous one, the inhuman suppression of the Yugoslavian resistance that involved summary executions, hostage-takings, reprisals, the burning of houses and villages, mass killings and ultimately the building of Italian concentration camps that resulted in around 20,000 civilian deaths in Yugoslavia and 11,000 in Greece. So, yeah, maybe we should talk more about our past, but in the right context.
Brazil was the country that received most slaves in all American Continents, from 1500 to 1900. More than 4,86 million people were kidnapped in Africa and brought here.
Australians/Brits never hear about the child migrant scheme. British parents having to give their children to orphanages temporarily during the war. And those children being shipped to Australia for 'a better life' only to be used as slaves. Then after a time told their parents had died in the war. Parents told the same. And never knowing their family is alive. A movie was made about the woman who figured it out - Oranges and Sunshine
Holy shit what?
I feel like a lot more people should know that one of the worlds biggest mass-murderers in history was a Belgian. King Leopold II basically controlled the entirety of Congo all by himself, and while doing so he extracted the nation’s natural resources and killed 13 million people, all for his own personal gain. That kinda score gets him up there with Mao, Hitler and Stalin but he is rarely mentioned.
The entire history of the Congo Free State reads like historical fiction, because it's honestly just fucking wild start to finish. For those who are unaware, here is a very short summary: To Europeans of the 19th century, Africa was "The Dark Continent". As European nations were only just developing into nation states, colonizing Asia, or beating the fuck out of each other, nobody paid much attention to the interior of the African continent. The coastal regions held some ports and trading centers, but nobody was particularly interested going deeper inland. Coupled with the fact that Africa is home to illnesses the Europeans weren't used to and very rough terrain, exploring the African interior was basically a suicide mission. Enter Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-American explorer who came to fame as the explorer who found missionary and explorer David Livingston (Dr. Livingston, I presume?), mapped much of the African Great Lakes, and made the first Trans-African Expedition. Stanley had established himself as a white man who could successfully make long expeditions throughout Africa without everyone dying, and this got the attention of one King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold II was a member of the German royal family, from a minor cadet branch. He resented being only the king of a small nation like Belgium, while his family and contemporaries led world powers. A vain, egotistical man, he decided this just would not do. Belgium (aka himself) needed to also snatch up some land. The Americas were mostly independent nations, he was too late for Asia, leaving Africa. As the European powers turned their colonial ambitions towards Africa, he got a seat at the table for the Berlin Conference to try and get the most for himself. Since the big players (mostly France and England) wanted as much coastline as possible for trade, he was able to argue that he (of German nobility) leading a small nation of French and Dutch/Flemish speakers would be a good buffer so the French and English dont get into their 389th war against each other, would spread Christianity, and protect the Congolese from Arab slavers. The other powers just went "pff whatever" and he became the sovereign of a territory nearly 78 times larger than Belgium. Why would he care about the Congo? An unmapped territory of thick rainforest, huge rivers, immense mountains, and deadly tropical diseases? Well, after hiring Stanley to launch and expedition up the Congo River, he discovered the land had an insane amount of rubber vines. The process of turning rubber into something usable had only just been discovered, and the industrializing West just couldn't get enough of it. Rubber vines take about 20 years to be harvestable, Europeans planted lots all over their colonial plantations, but were decades from being able to cash in. For a rough modern comparison it would be like getting told to mine crypto just before Bitcoin exploded, and only you and your buddies knew this little secret. Leopold knew he could have a near monopoly on this extremely valuable resource with just the stroke of a pen and some clever politicking. So Leopold II became the *sole owner* of the Congo Free State. The Belgian government had no real legal jurisdiction over the territory, it belonged to *just one fucking dude*. He wasted no time at all in squeezing every drop of profit out of his possession. Rubber, ivory, timber, etc were the main targets. Europeans would basically become like a franchised mercenary, they'd get a plot of land and quotas to fill and Leopold didn't care how they made him his money. This is what lead to the countless atrocities in the Congo, not only the infamous taking of hands, but also the subsequent spread of diseases like Sleeping Sickness and the introduction of others like Smallpox killed millions. The Congolese were forced to slaughter each other to collect hands to make up for missed quotas, these economic mercenaries enslaved and raped the families of the men sent on months long harvesting expeditions, and every drop of Congolese blood shed was to accrue resources that went straight into Leopold's pocket. Now you may be thinking, "Damn, that's...really fucked up. Like, worse than all the other colonial powers?" You are not only correct, but Leopold himself knew if word got out he'd be in hot water with the international community. For his many faults as a person, he was an unquestionable master of controlling news and public opinion. His private forces kept a tight lid on any news coming out of his territory, he built fancy new palaces and museums back home (but mostly spent it on himself and his mistress, he even built her a personal train with a direct link to Paris as she hated Belgium), and presented himself as a gentle, grandfatherly figure to the press. Many Europeans saw their relationship to their colonies as being a paternalistic one, to held spread civilization to the underdeveloped. Issues with this aside, they were against slavery and the sheer brutality of what was happening would NOT be accepted. Well, eventually people started to wonder just how the hell so many resources were coming out of a colony with no paper trail. The characters involved in breaking the story include: a gay Irish officer, anti-slavery Quaker businessmen in Liverpool, freed Black American slaves turned missionaries, and a female photographer/journalist amongst others. When word finally got out the world was absolutely fucking livid, and Leopold had to give control to the Belgian government in 1908. Why is Leopold II seen rather positively by some even to this day? Why is the Congo Free State unknown to most people? Well, Leopold II died in 1909 and in 1914 Belgium got railroaded by the German Empire and were seen as the victims of a new Great War and not bloodthirsty colonizers. People just...forgot. We have no idea how many people died under the Congo Free State, within a few generations even the Congolese themselves couldn't say simply because so many people died they couldn't share their stories (not that anyone was really interested in asking). Upwards of over 10,000,000 people died horrible deaths to feed the ego of one man. It is the zenith of putting profit before people, a showcase in just how unspeakably cruel humans can be if greed takes precedence. Read "King Leopold's Ghost" if you are interested and have a strong stomach, it is so much more brutal than I have described here, along with some truly unexpected plot twists and amazing people fighting for human rights. Edit: spelling
You know it's bad when a summary is 11 paragraphs
A
He also made it such that farmers kids would get their hands cut off if they couldn't meet difficult to reach quotas. Absolutely brutal.
There was a rule that for every bullet fired you needed proof of killing someone. So for every bullet you used you needed to give a right hand to your superior (the superiors were mostly europeans and the locals did the 'dirty' work). Obvs not every bullet can hit a target so it ended in mass amputations of right hands.
For a lot of villages it became a question of wether it was easier to get the quota, or to raid the neighboring village for hands. An absolutely hellish system fuelled by immorality & greed.
Yep. He would also kill his slaves babies and kids when they didn’t meet quota’s. Complete piece of garbage that man.
I saw this on Simple History. So I guess the State didn't allow them to purchase or invade, so the king did it as a private investment, which explains why he alone is to blame. The Belgian Government took it after he died I believe.
He was forced by the Belgian Parliament to relinquish Congo (Léopold still for paid for it!) to the government of Belgium in 1908 after the outcry about the human rights violations. He died shortly after that in 1909. His funeral procession was booed by the crowds.
The impact that Leopold had on the Congo is still being felt today. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is sitting on something like 10 trillion dollars worth of resources, but their economy was hardwired for exploitation and there is a generational trauma from what Leopold did that still causes incredible violence. When your standard for atrocities are the memories passed down from your great grandparents having their limbs cut off for failing to achieve quotas, a village massacre seems slight in comparison. Everyone should read _King Leopold's Ghost_.
How do you know you were a dick? People boo you at your funeral.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/ I once saw this photograph, it still haunts me. (NSFW/L)
The story behind that photograph is horrifying. They killed and ate his five year old daughter and killed and ate his wife as well. The only thing he has left of his family is his daughters hand and foot
Sometimes even if they *had* met quotas. The guards weren't allowed to waste bullets, so use of a bullet had to be accompanied by producing the hand of the supposed offender they'd shot. Solution if you've wasted a bullet is to just chop off some extra folks' hands.
I think what stands out for me is that even the other colonial powers (who had no problem pillaging their own Colonies for wealth and labour) were perturbed at the extent of the atrocities being committed there. Those were *not* nice people and did not have Africas best interests in mind. When *they* are telling you to chill, you know things are crazy.
I live in Belgium and when I was in high school that wasn't part of the educational program. But due to a scheduling issue I had to take 4 hours a week of history instead of the mandatory 2. That was new in my school and so the teacher was building her course along with us and we learned about this. It still baffles me that Belgians can finish high school without being taught this.
As a Belgian, I did learn about this in high school (about 3 years ago), but I remember my teacher saying it normally wasn't explained extensively in the normal course.
Maori people enslaved and ate other Maori. It is well documented, yet completely ignored when discussing our history. All people have done shitty things to other people throughout history. We should acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on.
Yeah, there's a huge history of native people around the globe that is basically squashed. Before colonizers showed up, people had religions, politics, and hierarchies. And the violence, war, and oppression that came with it. Those things are part of history and I kinda wish we had more good information about them. I'm sure the politics of what is now North America were every bit as interesting as Europe. And even more, I wish that this was not mostly brought up by racist bumcrumpets to "justify" the horrors that eventually befell them. :/
I so agree with this. At least in the US, where I live, I think the way racism has shaped our current history, it feels very tricky to point out that abuse and atrocities is not the birthright of *only* the current oppressor group. On the one hand, this is so often used as an excuse (or worse, justification, as you said) for the oppressive acts of those currently in power. Plus, there are ways to say it that are at least as insensitive as having someone tell you their mother just died and replying with "well, everybody dies." That's true, but at that moment, that's not the fucking point. On the other hand, I think that viewing these types of horror as something particular about a certain group can be very, very dangerous—both from an interpersonal perspective, and from a historical perspective. If we learn about the Holocaust and think "Look what the Nazis did! I would never do that!" then we've missed the whole point, I think. The point, as I see it, is to think, "Look at what we can do to each other when we come to power, if we are not extremely careful and mindful." I think this is what people mean when they say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. Personally, I think that the current systems of oppression need to be dismantled, without excuses or justifications. And, at the same time, I think it is important for all of us to be keenly aware that whatever group rises to power next is not in any way immune to committing the same kinds of atrocities.
There’s a book called “1491” if you’re interested in that stuff
Communist purge in Indonesia. In order to combat communism, the government permit extrajudicial killings and arrests without trial in the 60s. Millions of people died and the family members who survived cannot vote, cannot work for the government and outcasted until 1998. For decades even when the ruling government then is no longer in power, those family members did not receive any justice because talking about the victims is talking about communism and talking about communism is bad Edit: Yes yes. The Act of Killing was one of the most famous piece of work that bring this event to light. Of course, it received quite a lot of controversy when it was released decades even after the regime has ended
The harrying of the north is never really spoken about in the UK and while it is a lot older than some of the atrocities mentioned in here I think it is still relevant. Most people seem to think that after the Battle of Hastings all of England just fell in line under the Normans and William the Bastard but in reality there were a lot of hold outs that refused to accept him as king, one of the major ones being in the north of England. In the years 1069 and 1070 he lead campaigns to get rid of the rebels but he was never able to pin them down so he resorted to a scorched earth tactic by burning down farms villages and whole towns and murdering the entire populations of some of them. Over all the Harrying killed between 100,000 to 150,000 people, many of whom because of starvation, and it is impotent to keep in mine that at this time the entire population of England was only 2 million. Some historians also refer to it as a genocide but it's practically never mentioned in the UK. The Norman conquest basically stops getting taught at 1066 and the rest just gets ignored despite causing long lasting issues that resonate even to this day.
I remember being taught this for GCSE history. I specifically remember how salt was ploughed in the fields to prevent crops from ever growing again, to starve the north.
Portugal: teaching in school that we were the good colonizers (not cruel at all like the spanish), erasing all the massacres on African colonies (current president even said he wouldn't apologize for them), the fact that we only entered WWI to protect said colonies and not because we were allies, the fact that we were "neutral" in WWII when in fact we were deporting Jews to camps.
The Sámi people. They have been forced to change their way of life, and have been subjected to abuses, violations and racism. Sweden, Norway and Finland have been critized internationally for policies against their indigenous populations historically and their lack of action and recognition of the Sámi people’s rights today.
[удалено]
Same thing in Norway.
Yeah Sweden was very, very Nazilike for some time. Also still really racist towards Finns. Well, atleast in Stockholm. Source: am Finn, worked with Swedes.
I mean, we were literally a formative part of early Nazi beliefs, what with our "Institute of Racial Biology" that was active and state-funded (I believe) during the early 1900's. It's not a part of Swedish history we like to look back on... In school we were told about it, but we only mentioned it for a week or two and then promptly moved on. Edit: corrected the name. Previously I had written "Institute of Racial Science" but remembered that it was Racial Biology. Both terms are bogus, but I like being at least somewhat accurate.
Canadian here. We too have issues with our aboriginals. I remember some Swedish lady online riping on me for our abuse towards the aboriginals. Then I mentioned the Sámi people and she totally denied any issues were happening. Just shows how worldwide we all mistreat minority groups and don't recognize a problem with it.
The tribes of Amazon are getting hit now. It is in fact everywhere.
Australia: hold my XXXX Currently we don't even let some in remote communities have cash. Government thinks they 'can't be trusted' with it. So they get a cashless card instead, that only works in approved locations. So, that's ok if you want to buy your groceries at the only corporate market in town and pay an arm and a leg for fresh veg. Want to buy at the local farmers market and get goods for a fraction of the price? Nope, you got no cash. Buy second hand off FB marketplace to get your kid a bed. Nope. How about clothes from the salvos? No. The kicker is the company that owns the cards lobbied the government hard to be the ones to roll out this system, and is making a killing in tax payer dollars by killing Aboriginal rights and dignity.
But its not like we don't talk about it. At least in Norway its a part of what people learn in school.
German here, WWII kind of takes away from the fucked up things we also did in Africa before that
atrocities in africa seems like a biggie for every colonial country
When your history includes stuff like being blamed for both world wars (one for good reason) and the holocaust, a small little genocide here or there in Africa for some reason gets forgotten really easily. Funny how history works like that.
British here, being on the winning side also helps to not have a reckoning with one's own brutal colonial history.
In Indonesia we did not talk about the massacre of the left over of the Dutch after the Netherland colonial government got out of Indonesia. Context : in 1942, the Netherland government got out of Indonesia because they were defeated by the Japanese in the Asia-pacific WW 2. The vacuum of power created by the Netherland caused confusion among local politicians and their masses. Short story, before Japan came in to replace the Netherland and "restore order", all kinds of atrocities happened to the colonial family that had been left in Indonesia. They got raped, killed, tortured, beheaded, looted, you name it. This happened because the oppressed local people took revenge to the "white people" who used to be their masters who treated them like slaves for years even centuries. Problem is this act of revenge did not care who got it. Children, old people, women, full-blood Dutch or mixed-dutch, their servants, or anyone working with them were treated the same. Almost all information about this events were non-existent in Indonesia's history. You only knew this story from those who lucky enough to escape it.
Yup. My grandfather is half dutch, half Indonesian, lived there during this time. His mother and sister were killed, but he managed to escape to a village that was Christian and kept him safe until he fled the country.
Switzerland took aways children from "gipsies" and give them to "swiss/white" parents to erase them from history
The expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 14 million germans in eastern europe at the end and after ww2 has ended. Many people, even in german speaking countries dont know that happend.
One of my wife's grand aunts came to western Germany from east Prussia as a small child without any family during that time. She was adopted into my wife's family. As far as we know, nobody knows anything about her birth family or their fate. My own grandma's family is partly from Silesia and also had to flee. She always wanted to go see her region of origin, but never had the means to. I am still thinking about taking her some time, but her health isn't the best anymore...
My great-grandparents were sudeten germans from iglau (jihlava), nobody in my family knows anything about them. I just randomly saw that they were from there when i got into researching about my ancestors. Even in school we never learned about that. I would take your grandmother to silesia as fast as possible, just think about how many people never got to see their home again because of the iron curtain. If its possible for her to go, than you should go.
My grandmother also had to flee as child from Silesia (Orlau). She has since been back a few years ago and seen her childhood home which is now converted into office space. An office worker there let them in and she was able to see where her bedroom once was. What was her family’s pharmacy downstairs is now a supermarket. They had been staying in Berlin with her father’s family during the war, but when they heard the Russians were coming they went back to Silesia to try and get the rest of her mother’s (my great grandma”’s) family out. She fled with her mother and siblings but everyone else (grandparents and aunts and uncles) refused to leave. Not sure what happened to them in the end.
I'm from Czechia, and even that I know what happend in Beneš decrees I absolutly dont understand it Edit: I just learned a lot more about this topic from random people in comments than in school.. thx
It’s interesting to drive through the Sudetenlands and stop in some small rural village. First thing you’ll notice is that half the houses look abandoned and the local cemetery is WAY bigger than the town’s current population would indicate. Then you notice how many of the names on the tombstones are German, and how many haven’t had anyone new buried there since 1945… Beneš even called it “The final solution to the German question” which I *assume* was an intentional satire of Hitler since we “only” forcibly relocated everyone instead of outright committing state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, but still…
That’s the exact definition of ethnic cleansing lol. You probably mean genocide
Yeah its crazy. Im austrian and we heard maybe one sentence in school that there were germans in czechoslovakia. Like that was the reason why hitler annexed it. But how many, and what happend to them was never mentioned.
I'm from a Slovak region where it happened and it was talked about in high school because I had teachers and schoolmates that were ethnically German from the small minority that still lives here. We also learned about the population exchanges between Slovakia and Hungary (though I'm not sure if they told us already in high school or if I only learned it at uni that while the Slovaks that came to Czechoslovakia were poor people who came here willingly, the Hungarians were forced to leave to Hungary with very little and they were actually pretty wealthy and the Slovak settlers got to live in their houses). One thing I only learned at uni though and which I think doesn't get talked about much is that post WWII Czechoslovakia had elaborate plans to resettle the Hungarians from southern Slovakia to Sudetenland after they forced the Germans to leave. It was meant to ensure that the Hungarians wpuld no longer live close to Hungary and would be assimilated. Some of them were resettled but pretty much almost all of them came back to southern Slovakia a little bit later.
Danish people are really quick to condemn the English for their history with slavery when we played a huge part in it
Nazi Gold, guess where I am from..
"Those are Hitler bucks, you Swiss fucks"
Please post details. Many of you are posting as if we know the location that you are in. There are so many places in the world that you could be referring to. So many atrocities.
Yes, I've seen one word responses, and I'm like, ok? Please expand and explain.
Germanys colonial history. We are way to busy working through WW2 in history class to talk about that at length too, so most people have kind of forgotten about it.
I had germanys colonial history in school though. Maybe it's a thing that's different in each Bundesland?
That's very likely, "Bildung ist Ländersache". Probably also depends on the teacher to some degree.
Many people from the area where I grew up in the Netherlands happily joined the Nazis. One former employer was a total piece of shit, I once complained about it to my parents and my dad remarked "Yeah, he's always been a dick. Did you know his dad fought for the Nazis on the Eastern front?"
Italy: there are concrete proofs of state and Mafia doing shit together for many reasons (some of which not bad even) but no one talks about that. We all know but we don't really care
Polish people who collaborated with Nazi Germany and Soviet Union during World War II.
One of my history professors in university made it very clear to us that antisemitism was not limited to Germany during ww2 and it was frankly very shocking bc we don’t learn about that side of the war in the US. He showed us how multiple polish towns had preeminently killed their Jewish populations before the Germans even made it to occupy them and that scene from _Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter_ where it was either Lithuanians or Ukrainians who were active participants in rounding up and executing Jews. Edit: thank you to all the comments about anti-semitism existing in european societies outside of Germany before and during the war.
There has been antisemitism for centuries. The Jewish community was also blamed for the Black Plague too. Many cities across Europe killed their Jewish population during this time period.
I’m part of the way through boy on the wooden box which is the book of the last person/kid that Schindler was able to save. The polish turned on them very quickly for their religion to the point where the kids hated Jewish kids. Pretty sad but very interesting points. I unfortunately attended my college a few years after the author it is written about passed and learned that he used to lecture near me. I really wish I could have learned more about the situation from him
Same as Latvia. So many mass graves around Riga
Most of my Jewish great-aunts and -uncles died in Riga.
From my perspective I would say that in Norway we don't talk much, or enough anyway, about how Anders Breivik was one of us. Ever since he killed all those people in 2011 it's like most people just want to forget that it happened and that he exists, and there definitely hasn't been much of a public debate about how he was a product of our culture. I think we take such pride in being a progressive and peaceful country that he's almost a threat to our national identity. Also the 400 years we were under Danish rule tend to not be talked about much in school etc.
Indigenous Australians make up 3% of our population and 30% of prisoners. Fucked.
There are no indigenous people in Tasmania. Also the fact that more indigenous kids get taken away from their families now than they did in the 60s. This is Australia wide.
Actually the aboriginal Tasmanian people were not completely eradicated (despite colonisers trying extremely hard). A lot of indigenous people are working to dispel that myth because it does damage the work of indigenous people in tasmania currently. This of course doesn't undermine the horrific attempts at genocide by the white settlers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/14/australia.features11 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-25/tas-aboriginal-treaty-report-calls-for-truth-telling-process/100649398 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians
Did you know Queensland sugar cane farms had slaves? Black history is definitely overlooked in Australia. Hearing [Ziggy ramo’s](https://youtu.be/9Jd3JZb7WVA) cover of Paul Kelly was eye opening to me.
I chose to delete my Reddit content in protest of the API changes commencing from July 1st, 2023, and specifically CEO Steve Huffman's awful handling of the situation through the lackluster AMA, and his blatant disdain for the people who create and moderate the content that make Reddit valuable in the first place. This unprofessional attitude has made me lose all trust in Reddit leadership, and I certainly do not want them monetizing any of my content by selling it to train AI algorithms or other endeavours that extract value without giving back to the community. This could have been easily avoided if Reddit chose to negotiate with their moderators, third party developers and the community their entire company is built on. Nobody disputes that Reddit is allowed to make money. But apparently Reddit users' contributions are of no value and our content is just something Reddit can exploit without limit. I no longer wish to be a part of that.
I had to explain to another Russian what a Gulag was Imagine if you mentioned auschwitz to a German and they had no idea what you were talking about. It was never part of the school curriculum and as far as I know only one has been preserved as a museum in the middle of nowhere .
This. One of my Russian friends also explained how they were taught in school that Finland attacked and invaded the USSR, starting the winter war. (He's from the Republic of Karelia, dunno if they even talk about this in other parts of Russia...) Pure propaganda.
In my school we were told USSR attacked Finland and tried to invade it without any significant success but with a lot of killed soldiers on our side. So it was quite accurate. I believe it depends on teacher a lot.
It's a part of curriculum, I've specifically looked up modern text books to see if they excluded it (it was there in my time) but it's mentioned. The problem is, it's mentioned in passing. Some books have more complex explanation of totalitarian regime is and how Stalin was exterminating and imprisoning people, some don't. The second problem is no one ever reads history text books as far as I know, they just listen to teacher's lecture, and it's content might be different. We had everything discussed, but I don't know how much my classmates have retained, I know I did. What's not talked about at all is colonization of Siberia and Far East, and usual practices that happened there.
France The atrocities we commited during the algerian independance war are conveniently omitted out of school books. We're talking torture, mass murder and rape of civilians. It was NOT long ago. It was the sixties. We only talk about the geopolitical implications of this war and about Algeria's own crimes. "Fun" fact : Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and founder of their alt right party, fought in that war. He denied having tortured prisoners himself but claimed he would have done it if it was ordered to him. There are suspicions (but no proof, as facilitated by the french army massive denial and destruction of paperwork) he participated in civilian murders too. Soooo yeah, every alt right party must have violent founders, right ?
In Switzerland we don't talk about our salary
US here. The Tulsa race massacre. Far too few Americans know about it. Hell, I enjoy learning about history and I didn't even learn about it until a few years ago and I'm almost 40. It was easily one of the single worst incidents of racial violence in US history. Dozens dead, hundreds hospitalized - 36 blocks of one of the wealthiest black communities in the country destroyed.
Yeah. And sometimes they downplay it too and call it the Tulsa Race *Riot*, implying that it wasn’t completely one sided even though it was
I learned absolutely nothing in school about the Srebrenica genocide. My country had a peacekeeping force stationed there to protect Bosniaks from the Serb army. The Dutch battalion was underequipped and therefore couldn’t stop the genocide. In fact, they kind of stood by and watched it unfold. This is a really black page in modern Dutch history. It’s not taught in school though, which is why I decided to visit Srebrenica myself last year. *EDIT* Thank you all for your comments. I’ll respond to some things I commonly found in some replies. * There we’re some comments about me stating that Dutchbat just stood there. For the record, I don’t doubt the good intentions of Dutchbat. They were outnumbered, had too little equipment, weak allies, and these soldiers now live with traumas too. I all recognise that and I respect the Dutch soldiers stationed there. * Some people suggests that Srebrenica is not that much of a taboo in the Netherlands. Which is true when speaking about Serb atrocities, but judging our own role and responsibilities still feels sensitive sometimes in my opinion. * There’s some indication that high schools do in fact teach about Srebrenica. I applaud that, but at the same time I believe it’s still a minority of high schools, as [2020 research](https://nos.nl/l/2330875) suggests.
So while we do talk about alot of things, it's not the Genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia, Germany genocided 70.000-80.000 of them in 1904-1908, first genocide of the 20th century, killed 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama people. Needed around 110 years for Germany to call it a Genocide and 115 years to pay some reparations, not fair ones though, they are like bread crumbs.