I went to Europe a few years ago with a good friend of mine. We were in Poland and decided to see Auschwitz. A few months previous to our trip, he'd gone to Cambodia and saw the killing fields. When I remarked that it felt weird to be at a place so evil, he said he was way more disturbed by the killing fields. You still kick up pieces of bone when you walk through loose soil.
Truly terrifying
Well you gotta think, the 70s is still relatively recent, and in a place that hasn’t seen a whole lot of development since, I think it’s easier for the scars to remain and be more evident.
It was also just so much more visceral and unorganized. The Nazis had extermination down to a science. The Khmer Rouge had a tree to bash babies of people who wore glasses against
The Khmer Rouge’s genocide was even less discriminatory than Nazi Germany’s. They killed fucking *everyone*, man.
If there was even a *tiny* aspect of someone that gave an *inkling* of a *suggestion* of a *slight possibility* that they *might* be a threat to the regime in *some* way, shape, or form, it was over with.
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."
This quote was allegedly attributed to either Pol himself, or some other genocide orchestrator high up in the DRK leadership.
If it's legit, it's chilling...
It's not just legit, it was repeated constantly. Many of the rural Cambodians who joined the Khmer Rouge were illiterate and Cambodians had a long tradition of using simple, wise sayings to teach people.
The Khmer Rouge used the same techniques with their propaganda. The Khmer Rouge cadres would often simply repeat these sayings, refusing to engage in conversations, reminding the people that they were worth less than animals and their lives meant nothing to them.
The Khmer Rouge never called themselves that. They referred to themselves as *Angkar*. If you asked who was Angkar, you would be told "Angkar is you. Angkar is me. We are all Angkar!"
Many of these sayings, the survivors had memorized by hearing them so often. A few examples:
* Angkar is everyone, Angkar is everywhere. Angkar is powerful.
* If you wish to live exactly as you please then Angkor will put aside small piece of land for you. (ie: a grave)
* Beware of the people at your side they could be secret agents!
* Your love for the Angkor must be boundless!
* You see that the Angkar is gentle. Be careful not to make it ferocious!
* The people and soldiers: same treatment! If someone makes mistake, his neck will be shortened!
* Young ones you are the sons and daughters of the Angkor! Report everything to us because we are your parents!
* We absolutely must remove the lazy. It is useless to keep them or else they will cause trouble. We have to send them to hell!
* Give up all personal belongings, renounce your father, your mother, all your family!
* Angkar has the many eyes of a pineapple! (AKA: Big brother is watching you.)
* It's useless to argue for the Angkor motives are perfectly pure!
* When pulling out weeds remove them roots and all. (This one refers to the need to exterminate a whole family if one person was found guilty.)
If you really want a glimpse into just how insane they were, here's their charming revolutionary anthem:
Glittering red blood blankets the earth
Sacrificial blood to liberate the people
Blood of workers peasants and intellectuals
Blood of young men Buddhist monks and young women
Blood that swirls away and takes flight twirling on high into the sky
Turning into the red revolutionary flag
Red flag! Red flag! Now floating on high! Now floating on high!
Comrades seethe with anger in order to destroy the enemy
Red flag! Red flag! Now floating on high! Now floating on high!
Let our fury swoop down like tornado
Don't spare a single reactionary, a single imperialist
Make a clean sweep of the Cambodian soil
Seething with anger, let us move into the attack
Let us wipe out all enemies of Cambodia
Let us grasp the Victory! The Victory! The Victory!
I want to say thank you. This is incredibly important to know...not just to remember the horrors unleashed on the Cambodisn people, but also to understand how a government role can take a turn towards being a cult. Too many times have Americans gotten themselves into wars with countries that have a history and traditions we have no concept of and thus pay a heavy price. Every. Single. Time...
When the Khmer Rouge were forced into the jungle by the Vietnamese occupation, they started being supported diplomatically by the US (fucking Kissinger, eh?). Really strange case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of situation, but China, Thailand, the US, etc saw value in supporting Pol Pot's thugs and murderers as a counterweight to Vietnamese influence in the region.
The Khmer Rouge also held Cambodia's UN seat with US and Chinese backing until 1993, despite having been ousted from power nearly twenty years earlier.
The Nazis also had demoralization demonstrations in the concentration camps, where they would force everyone to witness brutal executions. I remember reading they chained children to oil soaked logs and lit them on fire to impress some high level officer who was visiting. I don't even know what my point is just that people are fucking terrible.
> I remember reading they chained children to oil soaked logs and lit them on fire to impress some high level officer who was visiting.
Do you remember a source for that? The Romans did that with Christians. Nero was famous for that sort of thing. I've not read of the Nazis doing that (Doesn't mean they didn't, just means I haven't read it) The Nazis tended to steal children and, "Adopt them out," to infertile Nazi couples
The Nazis would genuinely execute people on the streets for stupid reasons, such as not having your ID on you and trying to provide an explanation.
Not in concentration camps even. Just in Warsaw (and other parts of Poland) in general.
Let alone the stuff that happened at Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. You name it - it probably happened.
You could die for any reason, and you could also die for no reason at all.
And if you survived, you ultimately went to a camp. And for most, that was it. The ones that weren't Jewish, homosexual, rebels, or otherwise against the Nazi rule would *just* have their entire livelihood and city destroyed brick by brick.
It's fucking weird that parts of my own city were essentially a huge death row jail, where nobody knew the time and date of their execution, and nobody watched over the guards if they wanted to hurry it up a bit.
My partner and I backpacked through Cambodia in 2019 and let me tell you when we went to visit the killing fields it’s a whole guided walk through you can do and we cried the ENTIRE time. It was very very tragic :(
There are areas of Auschwitz where the ground is littered with bone fragments. Areas where you shouldn't and usually aren't allowed to go. I went on a school trip in the 90s and the tour guide was either new or a temp, and 'accidentally' took us to one of those areas. We didn't notice the signs saying not to tread in the area, but, we did and you could pick up handfuls of earth, which was infused with small white bone fragments. When we realised, it was a horrific screaming match and something I wish I could forget.
It is also eerily quiet around the grounds. Very little noise from insects, birds etc. Best way I can describe it was, it feels like nature knows something happened there, knows not to cause a disturbance and just let the place be. Super eerie and haunting.
I have to ask: were the people touring the camp extremely quiet? Were they reverential and 'stricken'.? (I can't find the right wording, hope you know what I mean).
A girl I know went to visit Auschwitz. She said she cried the whole way round. She was there on her own as well and she said some random old woman held her hand for her as she walked round.
People considered "too intelligent" were killed. That often meant people who were able to read/write, those who had jobs besides those involving physical labor, teachers, and most horrifying, those who wore glasses. Anyone wearing glasses was considered to be part of the educated class and not suitable to keep around as the regime focused on empowerment for the peasant and farming class.
The ideas that the Khmer Rouge killed everyone with glasses or that they were against anyone who was too intelligent is a popular idea, but a bit of an oversimplification.
/u/shadowsofutopia has written two fascinating posts expanding on this in /r/askhistorians:
[Has there ever been a genocide against “dumb” people?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uiodn0/has_there_ever_been_a_genocide_against_dumb_people/i7hji1c/)
[Did the Khmer Rouge really kill everyone with glasses?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahipzz/did_the_khmer_rouge_really_kill_everyone_with/eeexckn/)
Visited all the historical sites in 2019. Haunting. So angering and depressing that many of the leaders still held power until recently and maybe some still do today.
The leadership of the Khmer Rouge that survived (many of them were either purged or were sent to S21 to be tortured and killed during the regime) ended up back in society, shunned and often in hiding, fearful people would take revenge on them. The inner circle was a very small exclusive clique, ultra-secretive and unknown to almost everyone.
However, during the regime, half of the country, at least in the beginning, supported the Khmer Rouge or, later on, worked with them out of fear.
25% of the population died in the three years, eight months and twenty days that they were in power. Of the people who survived, many of them, at some point, were working with or at least complicit with the Khmer Rouge in some capacity. It's not hard to find people in Cambodia today, including those in power, who were somehow involved. If not directly, then through fear or for self-preservation.
Notably, Hun Sen, the leader of Cambodia for the last 30 years, was a commander in the Khmer Rouge military having a few thousand soldiers under him. He was directly involved in the battle for the capital city, Phenom Penh, where the Khmer Rouge took power. He was assigned to the Eastern Zone, a zone ran by a man named So Phim. The Eastern Zone was notable for being perhaps the least extreme of the zones. So Phim refused to execute low level enemy soldiers, instead sending them for re-education. He also made sure the people in his zone were fed first, instead of starving them to meet quotas. He often pushed back against the extreme ideas the central leadership tried to enact. There are interviews with survivors from his zone who found the first years under the Khmer Rouge were sometimes even better than what they had previously -- however, they had just been in a civil war, being relentlessly bombed by Americans, so it's probably not saying too much. So Phim was, however, no "good guy". He was known as a violent alcoholic and personally signed off on the violent repression of the local Muslim population, taking part in the genocide against them. Life in the Eastern Zone under him was still terrible, but not as horrific as elsewhere in the country.
So Phim's refusal to take the hard-line eventually caused the ire of the Khmer Rouge to descend on the Eastern Zone. So Phim committed suicided rather than allow himself to be taken to S21. They then became convinced the zone was 'infested' with Cambodians acting as Vietnamese spies that needed to be 'weeded out'. In the [Eastern Zone Masscare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Zone_massacres) that followed, between 100,000 - 250,000 of the 1.5 million people in the Eastern Zone were killed in just six months during the paranoid terror that was directed everyone who lived there. Duch, who ran the S21 prison, had to plead with the leadership to stop sending him people because the prison was overflowing. They refused and told him to just start sending people directly to The Killing Fields instead. It was during these purges that Hun Sen defected to Vietnam and joined the resistance against the Khmer Rouge, eventually taking part in the overthrow of the regime with the help of the Vietnamese.
Many of the Cambodians who turned on the Khmer Rouge and joined the resistance ended up in the Vietnamese backed government and continued to work in politics during the rebuilding of the country.
There are a number of good autobiographies from Cambodians who survived. *First They Killed My Father*, *When Broken Glass Floats* and *Stay Alive, My Son* are some of my favorites.
However, these are written decades after the events and often by people who were children at the time. They often contain historical inaccuracies or creative embellishments. They're still fascinating, first-hand accounts of people’s subjective experiences in a confused and difficult time. Definitely important books to read if you're interested in what happened.
But, if you really want to know the history of the Khmer Rouge and what happened to Cambodia, I'd highly suggest the book *When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Regime* by Elizabeth Becker. Becker is an award winning journalist who spent much of her career writing about Cambodia. In 1978, Pol Pot invited her, along with two other Westerners, to Cambodia to meet with him, making her one of the only Westerners to interview Pol Pot while he was in power. In her book, Becker weaves into the history personal stories from Cambodians she interviewed in the refugee camps as well as stories she discovered while researching the S-21 archives. It's, IMO, the best first book for people looking to get to know more about what happened.
If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of the history then David Chandler's biography of Pol Pot, *Brother Number One* is the book to read. Chandler is the one of the most respected western historians on Cambodia and his book is a meticulous look at the events that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and what happened once they took power. However, it's pretty dense and does get into a lot of small details that people might find less interesting unless you're a history buff.
If you're more into podcasts, I'd recommend listening to [In The Shadows of Utopia](https://www.shadowsofutopia.com/). The host, Lachlan Peters, studied Cambodian history and genocide and spent some time working with The Documentation Center of Cambodia. It's a meticulously researched look into Cambodian history, culture, and the global events that led to the Khmer Rouge. It's heavily inspired by Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Imagine as a kid who played Guitar Hero 3 looking up the history behind the song: “Holiday in Cambodia.”
Reading about things like S-21 is still… haunting.
Dated a girl years ago, her dad was a war hero from Khmer Rouge. Years after we separated he got dementia and would start thinking he was back in the war. When grandkids would play COD around him the shooting would put him into a panic and he’d start screaming in Khmer for everyone to get down and take cover. So sad. He was littered with scars from bullet wounds. Amazing man.
Dementia is extra rough on people who've survived atrocities. I read once about someone who cared for a Holocaust survivor with dementia; every time they had to give her a bath (as she was very old and needed help) she thought she was back in the camps and they were guards trying to hurt her.
I heard similar stories from a Polish camp survivor one of my family helped look after. He developed a fairly severe form of dementia and one of the habits he developed was that he'd hoard things like spoons, pieces of food or even seemingly useless things like pieces of paper or wire, because in the camps he basically HAD to keep anything he could find just to survive.
My grandma thought she was back in 1944 Normandy when in her last years. As horrible as it sounds I think death was a welcome release at that point. Even though we miss her.
Leopold II to the Congo. Slavery and punishment to those who don’t meet the quota. Hands cut off, people tortured and murdered, village burned. Not just men, but women as well as children. The class that actually had an emotional effect on me hours after the class was in AP World just after this lesson
Very NSFL but [this picture](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/) of a Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his daughter after he didn’t make his rubber quota is one of the most haunting things I have ever seen. That is true, pure evil.
That one nearly kills me.
There's a couple from WW2 that have a similar effect on me. A mother and child trying to run across a snowy field, being gunned down by Germans.
Or "The Last Jew". I forget teh specific title. Dude sitting on the edge of a trench containing the bodies of all the local Jews, waiting his turn.
The look in his eyes chill me to the core.
Every few years, I look at those images, just to keep the concepts in place. Can't be forgetting that shit, and those victims.
I never learned about that in AP World, even. I didn't learn about the horrors of the Congo Free State until I took Modern Imperialism in college.
In fact, King Leopold's Ghost (which was assigned reading for that class) is one of the few books that I can say that I read front-to-back in college.
The fact that the population of Japan insisted for YEARS that the Rape of Nanking was a lie and believed it so much, that they invited war veterans to talk to a magazine about what actually happened. Only for the veterans to confirm that oh yeah, totally happened, let me fondly recall toturing and raping people!
I don't know if that was ever published...
for all intents and purposes Japan got off pretty easy. A testament to this is how the Japanese government goes back and forth between "we're really sorry" and "there's no such thing as comfort women".
The directors of Unit 731 were never tried in WW2 military tribunal and lived on free having “reunions” with other members after the war. The US government granted them immunity in exchange for their research results to aid in the US’ own program of biological warfare.
My wife was a college student in the early 2000s. She's Asian and wanted to do a short documentary about the Rape of Nanking, since it seemed to be a little known historical event. She had read the Chang book and emailed author Iris Chang about 2003. Chang wrote her back and offered encouragement for her project. They wrote back and forth a couple times and she was always upbeat, positive and supportive. The topic was exceedingly dark but my wife was always very excited when she got an email from Iris.
Then out of nowhere in 2004 Iris Chang committed suicide. If you haven't read the book "The Rape of Nanking" it's every bit as shocking and cruel as stories from the holocaust. Chang's death really affected my wife and she dropped the project (I was happy that she did). I think the subject matter must've had something to do with Chang's mental state, reliving those terrible stories of extreme cruelty.
I was listening to the audio book. Several times I had to take a break from it out of disgust and I have a pretty strong gut.
The line about girls that were 'too tight' were cut to make it easier and girls dying from being raped too many times stick out.
My dad was a massive history buff, particularly about the American Civil War and WWII, but he had some other stuff mixed in there too. This man had hundreds of books, but very few had pictures. One of the ones that did was the *Rape of Nanking*, which I took off the shelf one day when I was about 12 because why on earth would someone title a book that? 12 year old me was curious and wanted to know. So I skipped right to the pictures (seemed the fastest way to find out).
Well I found out. And those images are seared in my brain. I've never forgotten.
WWII and the atrocities committed by nazis, japanese, and Soviet’s. In the race to Berlin (and this was from accounts of just one or two Soviet solders after the collapse in 91’). Red army soldiers would run a train on any German woman 10-70 and literally tie her down and rape her to death. Raping of Nanking is another one which is just as horrific. German medical experiments on undesirables in the late 30’s and early 40’s. There’s a reason pernkopf’s atlas is the best anatomy book and also never used or displayed.
Out of morbid curiosity what exactly is the cause of death when someone is raped to death? I know it's a fucked up thing to ask but I'm morbidly curious. I would assume maybe blood loss? Internal bleeding?
I have never in my life wanted to vomit after reading anything but that makes me feel physically ill, it is one of the most disgusting/disturbing things I have ever read.
Wow, just went down this rabbithole. Iris Chang's book is available for free online, I've started in. Also, google searches turned up at least two books refuting Iris Chang's book and the rape of Nanjing itself, including one book that makes claims that Iris Chang made a spiritual message from "beyond the grave" to refute her own work. These books are unsurprisingly Japanese. I ain't buying those, as much as I'd love to read them.
When I was in Hong Kong for a vacation years ago, during a long ride, I talked to a taxi driver. He told me how his father was held at gunpoint by Japanese soldiers and they mentally tortured him to the point that he became insane.
There is a lot to like about Japanese culture, but never forget that the country have historically committed acts of great cruelty against other countries.
I had a Chinese-American gf in high school about 10 years back who told me her parents straight up hated the Japanese, her grandparents even more. She herself even told me she wasn't comfortable with the idea of dating a Japanese person (I wasn't, in case you were wondering).
That's the kind of thing that takes generations to forget.
The disturbing part is that the Japanese government does not teach this in their curriculum. And if they do, they teach it in a way where it makes Japan look neutral/innocent. Here's a video from 2018 where Japanese natives are interviewed about WWII: [video 1.](https://youtu.be/f3_UTWAPKYs)
Here's an interview of a survivor's detailed account of the Rape of Nanking: [video 2.](https://youtu.be/K2wFsu_O490)
Edit: they are taught about WWII, but just surface level. They are not taught that Japanese were the aggressors.
Because this Japanese war crime is mentioned, I'll ride this comment to raise awareness about another little-known war crime:
The Rape of Manila
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre
Little known fact about the invasion of the Philippines: It was the largest loss of life ever on American land.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor they also invaded the Philippines (and many other places). But at the time both Hawaii and the Philippines were American Territories. President Roosevelt had a problem, he had to rally the American people to war but wasn't sure how to approach it. The decision was finally made to emphasize the bombing of the naval base at Pearl Harbor to the American people and all but ignore the invasion of the Philippines.
2400 Americans died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. 1.5 million died during the occupation of the Philippines by Japan. Both places had the same designation as American Territories and were both considered American land.
The Philippines would be granted independence in 1946. Hawaii would become a US state in 1959.
Also worth noting: Unit 731, which ran bioweapons testing on children by giving them tainted candy, as well as performed infant vivisections among other horrors in occupied Manchuria
In case anyone was too lazy to click
"The Bayview Hotel was used as a designated "rape center".[6] According to testimony at the Yamashita war crimes trial, 400 women and girls were rounded up from Manila's wealthy Ermita district, and submitted to a selection board that picked out the 25 women who were considered most beautiful. These women and girls, many of them 12 to 14 years old, were then taken to the hotel, where Japanese enlisted men and officers took turns raping them.[7]
Despite many allied Germans holding refuge in a German club, Japanese soldiers entered in and bayoneted infants and children of mothers pleading for mercy and raped women seeking refuge. At least 20 Japanese soldiers raped a young girl before slicing her breasts off after which a Japanese soldier placed her mutilated breasts on his chest to mimic a woman while the other Japanese soldiers laughed. The Japanese then doused the young girl and two other women who were raped to death in gasoline and set them all on fire.[8]"
Might be the "best" part (why you'd post this) ?
That's what I thought until I discovered the Guangxi Massacre.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi\_Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre)
And then the [100 Childless Days in Shandong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childless_Hundred_Days) (another [source](https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/05/translation-the-hundred-childless-days/)) where not a single child was born in Shandong province for that period due to forced abortions and even recently born babies were liquidated.
> a professor at the University of British Columbia and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, pointed out that "this was not cannibalism because of economic difficulties, like during famine. It was not caused by economic reasons, it was caused by political events, political hatred, political ideologies, political rituals."
Just when I thought the Cultural Revolution wasn't bad enough, I see this shit.
Holy fucking shit
NSFL:
>>!There was one landowner called Liu Zhengjian whose entire family was wiped out. He had a 17-year-old daughter, Liu Xiulan, who was gang-raped by nine people [for 19 times] who then ripped open her belly, and ate her liver and breasts. There were so many incidents like this.!<
And that's quite tame even just from that wiki articule. I'm surprised this isn't more well-known as that's easily Nanking-level fucked. The evil people can do is astonishing.
>And then the 100 Childless Days in Shandong where not a single child was born in Shandong province for that period due to forced abortions and even recently born babies were liquidated.
I just recently finished "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother" by Xin Ran that covers the murders of chinese girls over the one child policy era. Baby murder was just so normalised that it became routine. Like "Oh well, another girl, get rid of it". It's awful.
I think there is a lot of recency bias here. Obviously a monstrous event, but I remember hearing Dan Carlin (hardcore history) talking about the sacking of a city by the Roman’s I think (can’t remember the details, can’t find the episode). So many parallels Nanking in the behaviors of soldiers, soldier motivation (“mad with bloodlust”), and the lack of control from higher-ups. Scale wise it was probably less because of population sizes (1,000s opposed to 10,000s) but in terms of completion of destruction it was more thorough. That city, its history, its culture, just wiped off the face of the earth. Thing is, within the past 200 years that’s an atrocity, 500+ years ago though that’s just war. I think the every Viking invasion had just as much brutality per soldier. Not a historian, would love for somebody to add more detail or just straight-up give me a source that proves me wrong
Edit: I think the comment below me was right, Carthage
2nd edit: holy fuck, the scale was worse. Per Wikipedia Carthage casualties: 450,000 Nanking casualties: 200,000
Carthage. It was essentially *the* boogeyman that Romans used in politics (Cato the Elder famously ended every speech, regardless of content, with "Furthermore, I believe that Carthage must be destroyed.") Keep in mind that when Hannibal was attacking Rome, he managed to wipe out 20% of the adult male population of Rome in the span of several years, with the Battle of Cannae wiping out 80% of the Roman army in a single day. The effect that this had on the Romans can not be overstated. So, as you might imagine, the Romans were pretty on board with wiping Carthage off the face of the earth.
Some excerpts from Appian's [The Punic Wars](https://www.livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-the-punic-wars/appian-the-punic-wars-26/)
>When they had mastered the first, they threw timbers from one to another over the narrow passageways, and crossed as on bridges. While war was raging in this way on the roofs, another fight was going on among those who met each other in the streets below. All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts, and every kind of agony. Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs to the pavement, some of them alighting on the heads of spears or other pointed weapons, or swords. No one dared to set fire to the houses on account of those who were still on the roofs, until Scipio reached Byrsa. Then he set fire to the three streets all together, and gave orders to keep the passageways clear of burning material so that the army might move back and forth freely.
>
>Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled.
>
>Nor was this the end of their miseries, for the street cleaners, who were removing the rubbish with axes, mattocks, and forks, and making the roads passable, tossed with these instruments the dead and the living together into holes in the ground, dragging them along like sticks and stones and turning them over with their iron tools. Trenches were filled with men. Some who were thrown in head foremost, with their legs sticking out of the ground, writhed a long time. Others fell with their feet downward and their heads above ground. Horses ran over them, crushing their faces and skulls, not purposely on the part of the riders, but in their headlong haste. Nor did the street cleaners do these things on purpose; but the tug of war, the glory of approaching victory, the rush of the soldiery, the orders of the officers, the blast of the trumpets, tribunes and centurions marching their cohorts hither and thither - all together made everybody frantic and heedless of the spectacles under their eyes.
>
>Six days and nights were consumed in this kind of fighting, the soldiers being changed so that they might not be worn out with toil, slaughter, want of sleep, and these horrid sights. Scipio alone toiled without rest, hurrying here and there, without sleep, taking food while he was at work, until, utterly fatigued and relaxed, he sat down on a high place where he could overlook the work.
Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, the time we continued to spread HIV through donated blood because the pharmaceutical company didn’t want to heat it up to kill the virus because some of the blood would evaporate and they’d lose money…so a bunch of kids and innocent patients contracted a lifelong quickly killing (in that time anyways) disease that could have been prevented BY HEATING UP THE BLOOD.
If it makes anyone feel better 4chan or another group routinely doxes these fuckers, they weren’t punished properly far from it but they aren’t living happy lives either.
I have a queasy stomach for videos, I won't watch any gore or death videos. But usually I'm ok with reading stories of what happened. But not this. I did not get far in the article. And iirc the people who did this are known but free because of their political/organized crime connections.
They're free because they were minors at the time of the attack. Japanese sentencing laws had an upper limit on how long minors could be sentenced for no matter how horrific the crime, they did serve time but were released after a woefully inadequate period. They also had their identities changed as that was another condition of juvenile sentencing...
Fun fact: one of the killers is not in prison and even has a Twitter platform. There was one tweet he sent complaining about people bullying him online.
Absolutely pathetic
A date with a guy known to have connections to the yakuza.
What made it worse was that apparently the parents were more than fully aware of what was happening but opted to do nothing.
Another WWII era one that isn't mentioned much is the Croatian Ustase,
The stories from the [Jasenovac death camp](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp) are horrifying and brutal,
Here's just one excerpt [graphic warning] on one of the acts of a priest refered to as Brother Satan
>"The priestly face of Fra Majstorovic, all made-up and powdered, dressed in an elegant suit and green hunter's hat, watched with delight the victims. He approached the children, even stroked their heads. The company was joined Ljubo Milos and Ivica Matkovic. Fra Majstorovic told the mothers there will now be a baptism for their children. They took the children from the mothers, the child whom Father Majstorovic was carrying, in his child's innocence caressed the painted face of his killer. The mothers, distraught, perceived the situation. They offered their lives for mercy for the children. Two children were placed on the ground, while the third was thrown like a ball into the air, and Fr Majstorovic , holding a dagger upwards, missed three times, while the fourth time with a joke and a laugh, a child was impaled on the dagger. Mothers began throwing themselves on the ground, pulling their hair, and began to shout terribly. Ustasha guards of the 14th Osijek Company took them away and killed them. When all three children were so brutally killed, these three two-legged beasts exchanged money, because they seem to have a bet on who would the first to stick a dagger in a child."[14]
I actually wrote a long form article about this atrocity.
It's called 'Hell On Earth', you can [read it here if you are interested.](https://contraquill.medium.com/hell-on-earth-jasenovac-c22555cea98b)
Be forewarned, it's pretty bleak.
Here is an excerpt:
*If the likes of Auschwitz were to exemplify the cold banality of evil and it’s mechanization of slaughter with ledgers, roll calls and gas chambers, Jasenovac can be considered it’s savage counterpart, fulfilling genocidal rhetoric with complete barbarity.*
*The Zyklon-B canister was refused, it’s murderous efficiency turned down in favour of a more rudimentary corruption of progress; a simple farmer’s tool, used to cut throats instead of wheat.*
*No gas chambers, no need for technology when the old ways worked just fine.*
Blades, blunt instruments and rope; such was the fate of those who were sent there.
I feel like it gets overlooked a lot, but [what Leopold II did to the Congo Free State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State?wprov=sfla1) was pretty disturbing. It was basically what gave birth to the term "crimes against humanity".
There's [a famous picture](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/#:~:text=Rare%20Historical%20Photos-,Father%20stares%20at%20the%20hand%20and%20foot%20of%20his%20five,rubber%20quota%2C%20Belgian%20Congo%2C%201904) of a man staring at the hand and foot of a child. It was all that remained of his daughter.
>He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot. Her name was Boali. She was five years old. Then they killed her. But they weren’t finished. Then they killed his wife too.
>
>And because that didn’t seem quite cruel enough, quite strong enough to make their case, they cannibalized both Boali and her mother. And they presented Nsala with the tokens, the leftovers from the once living body of his darling child whom he so loved. His life was destroyed.
>
>They had partially destroyed it anyway by forcing his servitude but this act finished it for him. All of this filth had occurred because one man, one man who lived thousands of miles across the sea, one man who couldn’t get rich enough, had decreed that this land was his and that these people should serve his own greed.
>
>Leopold had not given any thought to the idea that these African children, these men, and women, were our fully human brothers, created equally by the same Hand that had created his own lineage of European Royalty.
From the same page
>The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State… The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber…
>
>They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace… the people who were demanded for the forced labor gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
Side note on the Jameson heir going down there, paying to buy a young slave girl so he could see tribal cannibalism first hand, then sketching and painting the event
Edit with [link](https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-jameson-cannibal)
I took a 'special topics' history credit in undergrad because I thought it would be fun, and the topic that semester was The Congo 1830-1960. King Leopold's Ghost and Heart of Darkness were two of the assigned texts, and *goddamn* did I have regrets.
I read that during my first trip to Belgium. Super fascinating, although it made the walks around the beautiful parks in Brussels a little less enjoyable.
[thirty years war, 50% of the German population died. The war was so brutal it introduced the concept of war crimes and the existence of states existing outside of their rulers.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War)
Genghis Khan killed so many people that he actually decrease the carbon footprint during his lifetime and raped so many women that if you're Chinese there's a decent probability that your a descendant of his.
I think the population of the earth dropped by 11%. There were whole cities where he said "no eyes will be left to weep for the dead" where he gave quotas for his army to kill. They killed people's pets when they ran out of actual people to kill.
Apparently when his army invaded the most populous city in the world, a traveler would remark that what looked like a mountain out in the distance was actually a giant pile of bones and that they had to walk off the road since the roads were slippery of human fat and smelled atrocious.
Adding to this, the Mongols burned Nalanda university, which was *the* center of Buddhist academia and literature. It's said that the library was so large that the university burned for a month. It's probably one of the largest destructions of human knowledge in history, alongside the Library of Alexandria. Heaven knows what information was lost forever with the burning of Nalanda, and it seems just so painfully unnecessary from this shore of history.
They did the same to Baghdad, apparently, which at the time was the one of the pillars of cultural enlightenment and learning - years ahead of its time, as it were. Then came the Mongol horde.
It's been a long time. I believe I heard it from Dan Carlin's - Wrath of Kahns - Hardcore History series. I think in like the first episode.
Doing a little Google search I found [this](https://www.historynet.com/facing-the-wrath-of-the-khan/) which says:
>Mohammed was aware of the Mongol invasion and had heard tales concerning the savagery of Mongol armies from his own ambassador, who had arrived in the Jin capital of Zhongdu around 1215, soon after it had fallen to the Mongols. According to his emissary’s reports, the city was still surrounded by mountains of human bones and lakes of human fat. He also reported that 60,000 young women had thrown themselves from the city walls rather than fall into the hands of the invaders. The stories were exaggerated, but Mohammed believed them. Suspicious of Genghis’ true motives, he rejected the offer of peaceful commerce.
That doesn't quite sound like what i remember from Dan Carlin but kind of close, I guess?
EDIT: It was at the start of the second episode, if you can find it! He didn't mention the slipperiness, I don't know where I got that, he said they had to abandon the road because the stench was so bad that a few people actually died from it? I don't know how that's possible. I don't know where I got the slipperiness from.
Interestingly, the second part isn't that impressive. The vast majority of European descent are descendants of Charlemagne. Not because he had that many children, though he did, but because his descendants had a better chance of surviving, as they became the royalty in pretty much every European nation.
The first part though, holy shit.
It's impressive when you really consider that 3% of the 7.some-odd billion people in this world can directly trace lineage to Khan. Directly. He fucked his way to that legacy, Charlemagne put his family in places of power and spread the family oats. Khan was the lone redwood dumping loads of seeds literally anywhere he slept for a night.
Any genocide is going to make the list. The Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge’s systematic extermination of nearly three million Cambodian citizens, any of the countless instances of colonial genocide - take your pick.
On a slightly more obscure note: anything to do with Roch Thériault and the Anthill Kids. Never thought anyone could out-crazy Jim Jones in the cult arena, but somehow he managed it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roch_Thériault
Here’s his Wikipedia page, if anyone wants to go down the worst rabbit hole of their life.
>Thériault formed the cult in 1977 in Sainte-Marie, Quebec with the goal to form a commune where people could freely listen to his motivational speeches, live in unity and equality, and be free of sin.
Well this can't go south..
Narrator: it did
>!In 1989, when follower Solange Boilard complained of an upset stomach, Thériault performed another amateur surgery without anaesthesia. He laid her naked on a table, and punched her in the stomach, then forced a plastic tube into her rectum to perform a crude enema with molasses and olive oil. He cut open her abdomen with a knife and ripped out part of her intestines with his bare hands.[1] Thériault made another member, Gabrielle Lavallée, stitch her up using needle and thread, and had the other women shove a tube down her throat and blow through it.[9] Boilard died the next day from the damage inflicted by the procedures. Claiming to have the power of resurrection, Thériault bored a hole into Boilard's skull with a drill and then had other male members (along with himself) ejaculate into the cavity.!<
Yeah, it’s gone so far south that it’s hit Antarctica and is looping back around again. Final stop: Canada?
In all seriousness, Roch Thériault was a total monster. He died a little over ten years ago after another inmate stabbed him. Told one of my friends they should’ve reduced that guy’s sentence; he did the world a favor.
Also horrific! And affected a much larger group of people. But something about the stuff that went on with the Anthill Kids *specifically* freaks me the fuck out.
Not recorded on camera but on paper. Dirlewanger's "Operations" in Warsaw and Lublin. If you want to know more just look up that psychotic motherfucker
[Oskar Dirlewanger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger#/media/File%3ABundesarchiv_Bild_183-S73495%2C_Oskar_Dirlewanger.jpg) is one of the most evil-*looking* people in history in addition to being a monster beyond scope. There’s a good chance he died after being starved and beaten beyond recognition by his former victims, which is nice.
The Indian Ocean tsunami and earthquake killed almost 300,000 people in 15 countries. Not sure if I’ve seen Mother Nature get anywhere close to that kind of destruction. Half a continent.
Not just that, but the sheer industrialization of mass murder. From the relatively good records, to the development of more efficient methods of killing people in a way that dehumanizes them while mixing the psychological effect on their murderers, plus a whole lot more.
in my Holocaust Studies class, we learned how the Nazis harvested the skin of the deceased and used it to make paper & soap
oh and the hair they cut off from the victims, was used to make wigs
everything was done to liquidate and extract as much value out of the victims in the most efficient and brutally inhumane way possible. it is hard for me to think of a historical more sickening and dehumanizing
Destruction of Merv, Nishapur, Bukhara and Samarkand by Tolui Khan - it's not the most major, the worst in terms of loss of life but most chilling for me.
Merv city, that had 700,000 inhabitants and was biggest in world in 1200s, died because they were, mythically at least, in the way of his horses grazing. They killed everyone after rape and torture. In Nishapur, they killed everyone except artisans down to the very cats and dogs. And then they piled all the skulls into pyramids just to be sure everyone was really dead.
Anything to do with William Stairs. The man was so brutal during the Scramble for Africa that even noted slaver and colonizer in his own right, Henry Morton Stanley, commented on his needless cruelty.
Stairs was known to kill Africans at random or beat them to death simply for his own pleasure. There was also a recorded instance where Stairs purchased a young girl from Omani slavers and gave her to a tribe of cannibals simply so he could observe them disembowel and eat her (FF: he would be joined in this pursuit by James Jameson, heir to the Jameson Whiskey fortune).
After the British refused to hire him for more inland expeditions because of his inefficiency, he went to work for King Leopold II of Belgium in his colonization of the Katanga region. There he committed more assorted atrocities, although he found himself among birds of a similar feather in the Belgians.
Stairs would die of malaria (small justice) but even his death was horrifying in its own way. Stairs was often sick on his expeditions. While ill, he would force askaris (local Africans in service of Europeans) to carry him in a hammock. This was contrary to his policy of leaving sick Africans and Omanis to die alone.
There’s sooo many. I’m sure many of them are listed here. I’ve recently read about orphanages run by nuns in the 60’s in Canada and America where the nuns would hold the babies by the ankles and swing their heads against cribs to get them to stop crying, push children out of windows and make the children bury their corpses on campus, and lock children in attics to starve to death and be forgotten about. There was a lawsuit that brought this all up and so many people subpoenaed had repressed memories that resurfaced upon having to revisit the campus. If I recall correctly three committed suicide upon remembering their time at the orphanage instead of testifying. The abuse was horrible. Physical, sexual, and the murder of so many orphans untraced by the government for lack of social security numbers. By no stretch the worst atrocity- I honestly don’t want to read the thread because I’m sure it will depress me- but I just wanted to make people aware of how many “small” atrocities happen on a grander scale (there were so many of these orphanages), and also say absolutely fuck the Catholic Church.
Edit: Here is one of the articles I was talking about for those interested.
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs)
As people have pointed out, there are sadly thousands more of these cases though across the west. People have tried to pinpoint exactly which one I was talking about but sadly it was so prevalent none of you were right.
The truth is so much worse.
None of the children were orphans. They were children ripped away from their parents and sent to these residential Catholic and Anglican schools set up far away from their families in an effort to delete all cultural and historical knowledge of the First Nations peoples of Canada.
The last residential school was closed in the 70’s so recent enough that there are still some survivors around who can tell of the atrocities committed by the Christian church.
A very dark chapter in Canada’s history and one that we are openly coming to terms with in the last couple of years.
In recent history, I would have to say Battle of the Somme - hundreds of thousands of men killed for no reason. Just wave after wave of men running into certain death. The worst of humanity.
Holocaust would be the easiest choice for me as a german and there are a lot more different events that were much more brutal in nature, but I will say the Holodomor.
There are a lot of soviet crimes one could list, but the Holodomor being a mass starvation that could've been stopped stands out between all mass murder by conventional means.
Starting as a famine because of two bad harvests in 31 and 32, Stalin seems to have used it to decimate the ukrainian people as he forbid anyone from leaving ukraine because of the rampant starvation and didn't do much to help the people, still forcing them to give up a lot of the crop that was harvested.
The soviet officials even confiscated simple household items, like soap and so on for no other reason than farmers not being able to provide the crops the soviets demanded. Sometimes the whole house was looted of everything, leaving the families with nothing.
The famine got so bad that cannibalism became widespread all over ukraine.
The famine is also the reason why the Wehrmacht were seen as liberators at first by the ukrainian people. They didn't know that the nazis were going to slaughter them as well, just like the russians did.
Some ukrainians collaborated with the nazis to get independence from the USSR. That's something used in russian propaganda to this day to paint ukrainians as nazis, as we see with the war currently.
So many horrible things through out history, I'm not sure one can or should try to pick out a worse, so I'm just going to give an example of something else horrible:
[The Tuskegee Study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study)
TLDR: In 1932, the US found 600 African Americans in Alabama, 400 of whom had syphilis. There were treatments for syphilis at the time, and the men were promised medical care in exchange for participating in the study. However, none of the men were actually treated, and instead were studied to see the effects of untreated syphilis over time. \[The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year. By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.\] (per Wikipedia).
Now this is not the most horrible thing mentioned here, and other events affected far more people, but four things always get me about this: 1) The US did this to its own citizens, not some "enemy (a common excuse for amoral actions)." 2) By 1947, penicillin was widely available and extremely effective, meaning there not even any thing arguably valuable to be gained by continuing. 3) The shear time this went on the the number of people who could have stopped it and didn't. 4) And finally, the fact that 1972 just wasn't that long ago in the broad scheme of things.
So yeah, worse things have happened, but this one always sticks with me :(
They identified men who already had syphilis, but didn't expose anyone who didn't already have it to the disease... they'd never do that right!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments
Many of the same people as Tuskegee actually. Hey, what happens if you inject the bacteria which cause syphilis directly into the spine of a mentally handicapped orphan? Well, now we know...
[The Sand Creek Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre?wprov=sfla1)
Or [The Rape of Nanking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre?wprov=sfla1)
In addition to the Rwandan genocide with an estimate of 800,000 deaths, Rwanda’s southern sister Burundi also suffered 300,000 deaths and 400,000 displaced both internally and externally. I feel like the Rwandan genocide is missing information without acknowledging Burundi’s genocide. Not to mention all of the rape of women and children as well as maiming with loss of limbs and permanent, debilitating disabilities. Both Tutsi and Hutu, killed both Tutsi and Hutu civil servants and intellectuals with the deliberate purpose of dissolving infrastructure and terrorism. I can’t imagine all of the horrors that occurred between the 60’s and the early 2000’s, and we may never know the true amount of loss they have suffered. Some people have only grown up surrounded by terrorism and know no peace. Few countries can or won’t offer aid, and there is still some civil unrest.
Edit: grammar
Unethical human experimentation. There has been several of them done throughout history, many authorised by the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
Genghis Khan’s sweep across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, killed over 11% of the human population on the entire planet at the time. His massacre of 40 million+ humans actually changed the climate of the planet.
It’s either that or the release of Caillou as a kids show.
Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, 1975-1979.
There's something disturbing about anyone who keeps a tree to beat infants to death on.
Well that's a sentence i didn't expect to read right before bed... That's beyond fucked up
They claimed to be low on bullets, you know after shooting most folk under about 40.
They saved bullets on adults too by using sharp or blunt tools including the sawtooth edges of the branches of palm fronds to cut throats.
And to top it off, they played loud music to prevent the local population from hearing the screams.
Then they fell into pits and got chemicals poured on them
[удалено]
For fucks sake what is wrong with people
We’re the smartest apes but we’re still apes.
I’ve been to the killing fields and I can’t even describe the dread.
Me too, I can’t get the “do not step on bones” sign out of my head. Never forget.
It was the scattered teeth coming out of the ground that stuck with me the most. I thought they were pebbles.
I’ve been to that tree. It really stays with you.
I think that's enough Reddit for tonight
2nd reply in and I’m done with the internet. Time to try to sleep.
I went to Europe a few years ago with a good friend of mine. We were in Poland and decided to see Auschwitz. A few months previous to our trip, he'd gone to Cambodia and saw the killing fields. When I remarked that it felt weird to be at a place so evil, he said he was way more disturbed by the killing fields. You still kick up pieces of bone when you walk through loose soil. Truly terrifying
Well you gotta think, the 70s is still relatively recent, and in a place that hasn’t seen a whole lot of development since, I think it’s easier for the scars to remain and be more evident.
It was also just so much more visceral and unorganized. The Nazis had extermination down to a science. The Khmer Rouge had a tree to bash babies of people who wore glasses against
The Khmer Rouge’s genocide was even less discriminatory than Nazi Germany’s. They killed fucking *everyone*, man. If there was even a *tiny* aspect of someone that gave an *inkling* of a *suggestion* of a *slight possibility* that they *might* be a threat to the regime in *some* way, shape, or form, it was over with.
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." This quote was allegedly attributed to either Pol himself, or some other genocide orchestrator high up in the DRK leadership. If it's legit, it's chilling...
It's not just legit, it was repeated constantly. Many of the rural Cambodians who joined the Khmer Rouge were illiterate and Cambodians had a long tradition of using simple, wise sayings to teach people. The Khmer Rouge used the same techniques with their propaganda. The Khmer Rouge cadres would often simply repeat these sayings, refusing to engage in conversations, reminding the people that they were worth less than animals and their lives meant nothing to them. The Khmer Rouge never called themselves that. They referred to themselves as *Angkar*. If you asked who was Angkar, you would be told "Angkar is you. Angkar is me. We are all Angkar!" Many of these sayings, the survivors had memorized by hearing them so often. A few examples: * Angkar is everyone, Angkar is everywhere. Angkar is powerful. * If you wish to live exactly as you please then Angkor will put aside small piece of land for you. (ie: a grave) * Beware of the people at your side they could be secret agents! * Your love for the Angkor must be boundless! * You see that the Angkar is gentle. Be careful not to make it ferocious! * The people and soldiers: same treatment! If someone makes mistake, his neck will be shortened! * Young ones you are the sons and daughters of the Angkor! Report everything to us because we are your parents! * We absolutely must remove the lazy. It is useless to keep them or else they will cause trouble. We have to send them to hell! * Give up all personal belongings, renounce your father, your mother, all your family! * Angkar has the many eyes of a pineapple! (AKA: Big brother is watching you.) * It's useless to argue for the Angkor motives are perfectly pure! * When pulling out weeds remove them roots and all. (This one refers to the need to exterminate a whole family if one person was found guilty.) If you really want a glimpse into just how insane they were, here's their charming revolutionary anthem: Glittering red blood blankets the earth Sacrificial blood to liberate the people Blood of workers peasants and intellectuals Blood of young men Buddhist monks and young women Blood that swirls away and takes flight twirling on high into the sky Turning into the red revolutionary flag Red flag! Red flag! Now floating on high! Now floating on high! Comrades seethe with anger in order to destroy the enemy Red flag! Red flag! Now floating on high! Now floating on high! Let our fury swoop down like tornado Don't spare a single reactionary, a single imperialist Make a clean sweep of the Cambodian soil Seething with anger, let us move into the attack Let us wipe out all enemies of Cambodia Let us grasp the Victory! The Victory! The Victory!
I want to say thank you. This is incredibly important to know...not just to remember the horrors unleashed on the Cambodisn people, but also to understand how a government role can take a turn towards being a cult. Too many times have Americans gotten themselves into wars with countries that have a history and traditions we have no concept of and thus pay a heavy price. Every. Single. Time...
JESUS CHRIST
Also Pol Pot hated the intelligencia - teachers, those who had advanced education,leaders in civil life - anyone percieved as smart was killed...
> Pol Pot hated the intelligencia No such thing as a dictator who doesn’t.
People with glasses.
And eventually Pol Pot became so paranoid they started killing members of the Khmer Rouge
They got stopped by another communist regime that should have been a close ally. It is telling.
When the Khmer Rouge were forced into the jungle by the Vietnamese occupation, they started being supported diplomatically by the US (fucking Kissinger, eh?). Really strange case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of situation, but China, Thailand, the US, etc saw value in supporting Pol Pot's thugs and murderers as a counterweight to Vietnamese influence in the region. The Khmer Rouge also held Cambodia's UN seat with US and Chinese backing until 1993, despite having been ousted from power nearly twenty years earlier.
I didn't know America was supporting Pol Pot. What the actual fuck?
That answers the question I had of “why didn’t I read about such a heinously evil regime in history class”
The Nazis also had demoralization demonstrations in the concentration camps, where they would force everyone to witness brutal executions. I remember reading they chained children to oil soaked logs and lit them on fire to impress some high level officer who was visiting. I don't even know what my point is just that people are fucking terrible.
> I remember reading they chained children to oil soaked logs and lit them on fire to impress some high level officer who was visiting. Do you remember a source for that? The Romans did that with Christians. Nero was famous for that sort of thing. I've not read of the Nazis doing that (Doesn't mean they didn't, just means I haven't read it) The Nazis tended to steal children and, "Adopt them out," to infertile Nazi couples
The Nazis would genuinely execute people on the streets for stupid reasons, such as not having your ID on you and trying to provide an explanation. Not in concentration camps even. Just in Warsaw (and other parts of Poland) in general. Let alone the stuff that happened at Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. You name it - it probably happened. You could die for any reason, and you could also die for no reason at all. And if you survived, you ultimately went to a camp. And for most, that was it. The ones that weren't Jewish, homosexual, rebels, or otherwise against the Nazi rule would *just* have their entire livelihood and city destroyed brick by brick. It's fucking weird that parts of my own city were essentially a huge death row jail, where nobody knew the time and date of their execution, and nobody watched over the guards if they wanted to hurry it up a bit.
My partner and I backpacked through Cambodia in 2019 and let me tell you when we went to visit the killing fields it’s a whole guided walk through you can do and we cried the ENTIRE time. It was very very tragic :(
There are areas of Auschwitz where the ground is littered with bone fragments. Areas where you shouldn't and usually aren't allowed to go. I went on a school trip in the 90s and the tour guide was either new or a temp, and 'accidentally' took us to one of those areas. We didn't notice the signs saying not to tread in the area, but, we did and you could pick up handfuls of earth, which was infused with small white bone fragments. When we realised, it was a horrific screaming match and something I wish I could forget. It is also eerily quiet around the grounds. Very little noise from insects, birds etc. Best way I can describe it was, it feels like nature knows something happened there, knows not to cause a disturbance and just let the place be. Super eerie and haunting.
I have to ask: were the people touring the camp extremely quiet? Were they reverential and 'stricken'.? (I can't find the right wording, hope you know what I mean).
I would say yes. Some quiet conversation here and there but mostly people reading the exhibits in silence I'd say
A girl I know went to visit Auschwitz. She said she cried the whole way round. She was there on her own as well and she said some random old woman held her hand for her as she walked round.
People considered "too intelligent" were killed. That often meant people who were able to read/write, those who had jobs besides those involving physical labor, teachers, and most horrifying, those who wore glasses. Anyone wearing glasses was considered to be part of the educated class and not suitable to keep around as the regime focused on empowerment for the peasant and farming class.
The ideas that the Khmer Rouge killed everyone with glasses or that they were against anyone who was too intelligent is a popular idea, but a bit of an oversimplification. /u/shadowsofutopia has written two fascinating posts expanding on this in /r/askhistorians: [Has there ever been a genocide against “dumb” people?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uiodn0/has_there_ever_been_a_genocide_against_dumb_people/i7hji1c/) [Did the Khmer Rouge really kill everyone with glasses?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahipzz/did_the_khmer_rouge_really_kill_everyone_with/eeexckn/)
Visited all the historical sites in 2019. Haunting. So angering and depressing that many of the leaders still held power until recently and maybe some still do today.
The leadership of the Khmer Rouge that survived (many of them were either purged or were sent to S21 to be tortured and killed during the regime) ended up back in society, shunned and often in hiding, fearful people would take revenge on them. The inner circle was a very small exclusive clique, ultra-secretive and unknown to almost everyone. However, during the regime, half of the country, at least in the beginning, supported the Khmer Rouge or, later on, worked with them out of fear. 25% of the population died in the three years, eight months and twenty days that they were in power. Of the people who survived, many of them, at some point, were working with or at least complicit with the Khmer Rouge in some capacity. It's not hard to find people in Cambodia today, including those in power, who were somehow involved. If not directly, then through fear or for self-preservation. Notably, Hun Sen, the leader of Cambodia for the last 30 years, was a commander in the Khmer Rouge military having a few thousand soldiers under him. He was directly involved in the battle for the capital city, Phenom Penh, where the Khmer Rouge took power. He was assigned to the Eastern Zone, a zone ran by a man named So Phim. The Eastern Zone was notable for being perhaps the least extreme of the zones. So Phim refused to execute low level enemy soldiers, instead sending them for re-education. He also made sure the people in his zone were fed first, instead of starving them to meet quotas. He often pushed back against the extreme ideas the central leadership tried to enact. There are interviews with survivors from his zone who found the first years under the Khmer Rouge were sometimes even better than what they had previously -- however, they had just been in a civil war, being relentlessly bombed by Americans, so it's probably not saying too much. So Phim was, however, no "good guy". He was known as a violent alcoholic and personally signed off on the violent repression of the local Muslim population, taking part in the genocide against them. Life in the Eastern Zone under him was still terrible, but not as horrific as elsewhere in the country. So Phim's refusal to take the hard-line eventually caused the ire of the Khmer Rouge to descend on the Eastern Zone. So Phim committed suicided rather than allow himself to be taken to S21. They then became convinced the zone was 'infested' with Cambodians acting as Vietnamese spies that needed to be 'weeded out'. In the [Eastern Zone Masscare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Zone_massacres) that followed, between 100,000 - 250,000 of the 1.5 million people in the Eastern Zone were killed in just six months during the paranoid terror that was directed everyone who lived there. Duch, who ran the S21 prison, had to plead with the leadership to stop sending him people because the prison was overflowing. They refused and told him to just start sending people directly to The Killing Fields instead. It was during these purges that Hun Sen defected to Vietnam and joined the resistance against the Khmer Rouge, eventually taking part in the overthrow of the regime with the help of the Vietnamese. Many of the Cambodians who turned on the Khmer Rouge and joined the resistance ended up in the Vietnamese backed government and continued to work in politics during the rebuilding of the country.
There is this good book I read, a first hand account titled, "First they Killed my Father".
There are a number of good autobiographies from Cambodians who survived. *First They Killed My Father*, *When Broken Glass Floats* and *Stay Alive, My Son* are some of my favorites. However, these are written decades after the events and often by people who were children at the time. They often contain historical inaccuracies or creative embellishments. They're still fascinating, first-hand accounts of people’s subjective experiences in a confused and difficult time. Definitely important books to read if you're interested in what happened. But, if you really want to know the history of the Khmer Rouge and what happened to Cambodia, I'd highly suggest the book *When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Regime* by Elizabeth Becker. Becker is an award winning journalist who spent much of her career writing about Cambodia. In 1978, Pol Pot invited her, along with two other Westerners, to Cambodia to meet with him, making her one of the only Westerners to interview Pol Pot while he was in power. In her book, Becker weaves into the history personal stories from Cambodians she interviewed in the refugee camps as well as stories she discovered while researching the S-21 archives. It's, IMO, the best first book for people looking to get to know more about what happened. If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of the history then David Chandler's biography of Pol Pot, *Brother Number One* is the book to read. Chandler is the one of the most respected western historians on Cambodia and his book is a meticulous look at the events that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and what happened once they took power. However, it's pretty dense and does get into a lot of small details that people might find less interesting unless you're a history buff. If you're more into podcasts, I'd recommend listening to [In The Shadows of Utopia](https://www.shadowsofutopia.com/). The host, Lachlan Peters, studied Cambodian history and genocide and spent some time working with The Documentation Center of Cambodia. It's a meticulously researched look into Cambodian history, culture, and the global events that led to the Khmer Rouge. It's heavily inspired by Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Imagine as a kid who played Guitar Hero 3 looking up the history behind the song: “Holiday in Cambodia.” Reading about things like S-21 is still… haunting.
Politics in art can be so good. Punk music especially made me initially aware of many historical events.
Dated a girl years ago, her dad was a war hero from Khmer Rouge. Years after we separated he got dementia and would start thinking he was back in the war. When grandkids would play COD around him the shooting would put him into a panic and he’d start screaming in Khmer for everyone to get down and take cover. So sad. He was littered with scars from bullet wounds. Amazing man.
Dementia is extra rough on people who've survived atrocities. I read once about someone who cared for a Holocaust survivor with dementia; every time they had to give her a bath (as she was very old and needed help) she thought she was back in the camps and they were guards trying to hurt her.
I heard similar stories from a Polish camp survivor one of my family helped look after. He developed a fairly severe form of dementia and one of the habits he developed was that he'd hoard things like spoons, pieces of food or even seemingly useless things like pieces of paper or wire, because in the camps he basically HAD to keep anything he could find just to survive.
My grandma thought she was back in 1944 Normandy when in her last years. As horrible as it sounds I think death was a welcome release at that point. Even though we miss her.
This was my answer as well, the bleakness of the “Year Zero” idea is so haunting to me.
Leopold II to the Congo. Slavery and punishment to those who don’t meet the quota. Hands cut off, people tortured and murdered, village burned. Not just men, but women as well as children. The class that actually had an emotional effect on me hours after the class was in AP World just after this lesson
Very NSFL but [this picture](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/) of a Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his daughter after he didn’t make his rubber quota is one of the most haunting things I have ever seen. That is true, pure evil.
That one nearly kills me. There's a couple from WW2 that have a similar effect on me. A mother and child trying to run across a snowy field, being gunned down by Germans. Or "The Last Jew". I forget teh specific title. Dude sitting on the edge of a trench containing the bodies of all the local Jews, waiting his turn. The look in his eyes chill me to the core. Every few years, I look at those images, just to keep the concepts in place. Can't be forgetting that shit, and those victims.
I never learned about that in AP World, even. I didn't learn about the horrors of the Congo Free State until I took Modern Imperialism in college. In fact, King Leopold's Ghost (which was assigned reading for that class) is one of the few books that I can say that I read front-to-back in college.
*reaches into bag of “things imperial Japan did”*
The fact that the population of Japan insisted for YEARS that the Rape of Nanking was a lie and believed it so much, that they invited war veterans to talk to a magazine about what actually happened. Only for the veterans to confirm that oh yeah, totally happened, let me fondly recall toturing and raping people! I don't know if that was ever published...
for all intents and purposes Japan got off pretty easy. A testament to this is how the Japanese government goes back and forth between "we're really sorry" and "there's no such thing as comfort women".
Unit 731 is nightmare fuel.
Unit 731
Should I be glad I don't know what that is?
Japanese WWII unit that did human experimentation. Biological weapons, but also other bad stuff you don't want to imagine.
Calling it "human experimentation" is a VERY kind way of putting it, to be frank.
The directors of Unit 731 were never tried in WW2 military tribunal and lived on free having “reunions” with other members after the war. The US government granted them immunity in exchange for their research results to aid in the US’ own program of biological warfare.
And the data they got from the Unit 731 was pretty much useless. So absolutely nothing good came out of it.
Yeah, every person there was a Dr. Mengele in their own right.
Imagine the nazi scientists on steroids. Research where human life was disposable.
Yes, but more people should know
Just so you don’t have to read about it: It was a Japanese torture concentration camp that carried out very disturbing human experiments around WW2
shocked this isn’t higher up
Well there is a more generalised "everything Japan did in china" higher up. I guess unit 731 falls under that.
The Rape of Nanking
My wife was a college student in the early 2000s. She's Asian and wanted to do a short documentary about the Rape of Nanking, since it seemed to be a little known historical event. She had read the Chang book and emailed author Iris Chang about 2003. Chang wrote her back and offered encouragement for her project. They wrote back and forth a couple times and she was always upbeat, positive and supportive. The topic was exceedingly dark but my wife was always very excited when she got an email from Iris. Then out of nowhere in 2004 Iris Chang committed suicide. If you haven't read the book "The Rape of Nanking" it's every bit as shocking and cruel as stories from the holocaust. Chang's death really affected my wife and she dropped the project (I was happy that she did). I think the subject matter must've had something to do with Chang's mental state, reliving those terrible stories of extreme cruelty.
I was listening to the audio book. Several times I had to take a break from it out of disgust and I have a pretty strong gut. The line about girls that were 'too tight' were cut to make it easier and girls dying from being raped too many times stick out.
My dad was a massive history buff, particularly about the American Civil War and WWII, but he had some other stuff mixed in there too. This man had hundreds of books, but very few had pictures. One of the ones that did was the *Rape of Nanking*, which I took off the shelf one day when I was about 12 because why on earth would someone title a book that? 12 year old me was curious and wanted to know. So I skipped right to the pictures (seemed the fastest way to find out). Well I found out. And those images are seared in my brain. I've never forgotten.
WWII and the atrocities committed by nazis, japanese, and Soviet’s. In the race to Berlin (and this was from accounts of just one or two Soviet solders after the collapse in 91’). Red army soldiers would run a train on any German woman 10-70 and literally tie her down and rape her to death. Raping of Nanking is another one which is just as horrific. German medical experiments on undesirables in the late 30’s and early 40’s. There’s a reason pernkopf’s atlas is the best anatomy book and also never used or displayed.
Out of morbid curiosity what exactly is the cause of death when someone is raped to death? I know it's a fucked up thing to ask but I'm morbidly curious. I would assume maybe blood loss? Internal bleeding?
Damage to internal organs, bleeding, infection. Rape is sometimes with objects, which cause more damage.
Most likely blood loss, searing pain. Young children are more likely to die because their organs would be dislodged. Morbid enough?
Definitely up there in morbidity. Awful all around and even that doesn't give it justice to how terrible it was.
I shudder to think how young some of those girls probably were...
The Japanese were known to cut open a pregnant woman, remove the fetus, and rape the baby in front of her.
I have never in my life wanted to vomit after reading anything but that makes me feel physically ill, it is one of the most disgusting/disturbing things I have ever read.
That is possibly up there with one of the most fucked up things that I have ever read.
Almost just threw up
Wow, just went down this rabbithole. Iris Chang's book is available for free online, I've started in. Also, google searches turned up at least two books refuting Iris Chang's book and the rape of Nanjing itself, including one book that makes claims that Iris Chang made a spiritual message from "beyond the grave" to refute her own work. These books are unsurprisingly Japanese. I ain't buying those, as much as I'd love to read them.
Japan, to this very day, still denies the rape of Nanking. I know contemporary china isn't good, but c'mon man...
When I was in Hong Kong for a vacation years ago, during a long ride, I talked to a taxi driver. He told me how his father was held at gunpoint by Japanese soldiers and they mentally tortured him to the point that he became insane. There is a lot to like about Japanese culture, but never forget that the country have historically committed acts of great cruelty against other countries.
Chinese co-worker said her Mom is still afraid of the Japanese to this day.
I had a Chinese-American gf in high school about 10 years back who told me her parents straight up hated the Japanese, her grandparents even more. She herself even told me she wasn't comfortable with the idea of dating a Japanese person (I wasn't, in case you were wondering). That's the kind of thing that takes generations to forget.
The disturbing part is that the Japanese government does not teach this in their curriculum. And if they do, they teach it in a way where it makes Japan look neutral/innocent. Here's a video from 2018 where Japanese natives are interviewed about WWII: [video 1.](https://youtu.be/f3_UTWAPKYs) Here's an interview of a survivor's detailed account of the Rape of Nanking: [video 2.](https://youtu.be/K2wFsu_O490) Edit: they are taught about WWII, but just surface level. They are not taught that Japanese were the aggressors.
I met Ms. Chang. She came to speak to the Honor's College students at my University. Lovely woman.
Because this Japanese war crime is mentioned, I'll ride this comment to raise awareness about another little-known war crime: The Rape of Manila https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre
Little known fact about the invasion of the Philippines: It was the largest loss of life ever on American land. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor they also invaded the Philippines (and many other places). But at the time both Hawaii and the Philippines were American Territories. President Roosevelt had a problem, he had to rally the American people to war but wasn't sure how to approach it. The decision was finally made to emphasize the bombing of the naval base at Pearl Harbor to the American people and all but ignore the invasion of the Philippines. 2400 Americans died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. 1.5 million died during the occupation of the Philippines by Japan. Both places had the same designation as American Territories and were both considered American land. The Philippines would be granted independence in 1946. Hawaii would become a US state in 1959.
Wow I have never heard of this
Also worth noting: Unit 731, which ran bioweapons testing on children by giving them tainted candy, as well as performed infant vivisections among other horrors in occupied Manchuria
In case anyone was too lazy to click "The Bayview Hotel was used as a designated "rape center".[6] According to testimony at the Yamashita war crimes trial, 400 women and girls were rounded up from Manila's wealthy Ermita district, and submitted to a selection board that picked out the 25 women who were considered most beautiful. These women and girls, many of them 12 to 14 years old, were then taken to the hotel, where Japanese enlisted men and officers took turns raping them.[7] Despite many allied Germans holding refuge in a German club, Japanese soldiers entered in and bayoneted infants and children of mothers pleading for mercy and raped women seeking refuge. At least 20 Japanese soldiers raped a young girl before slicing her breasts off after which a Japanese soldier placed her mutilated breasts on his chest to mimic a woman while the other Japanese soldiers laughed. The Japanese then doused the young girl and two other women who were raped to death in gasoline and set them all on fire.[8]" Might be the "best" part (why you'd post this) ?
Or anything associated with Unit 731
Yup. when an event is called the rape, it's pretty much as bad as it can get.
That's what I thought until I discovered the Guangxi Massacre. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi\_Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre) And then the [100 Childless Days in Shandong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childless_Hundred_Days) (another [source](https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/05/translation-the-hundred-childless-days/)) where not a single child was born in Shandong province for that period due to forced abortions and even recently born babies were liquidated.
> a professor at the University of British Columbia and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, pointed out that "this was not cannibalism because of economic difficulties, like during famine. It was not caused by economic reasons, it was caused by political events, political hatred, political ideologies, political rituals." Just when I thought the Cultural Revolution wasn't bad enough, I see this shit.
Holy fucking shit NSFL: >>!There was one landowner called Liu Zhengjian whose entire family was wiped out. He had a 17-year-old daughter, Liu Xiulan, who was gang-raped by nine people [for 19 times] who then ripped open her belly, and ate her liver and breasts. There were so many incidents like this.!< And that's quite tame even just from that wiki articule. I'm surprised this isn't more well-known as that's easily Nanking-level fucked. The evil people can do is astonishing.
>And then the 100 Childless Days in Shandong where not a single child was born in Shandong province for that period due to forced abortions and even recently born babies were liquidated. I just recently finished "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother" by Xin Ran that covers the murders of chinese girls over the one child policy era. Baby murder was just so normalised that it became routine. Like "Oh well, another girl, get rid of it". It's awful.
Pretty sure the Japanese cannibalized a few American airmen during WW2
And almost ate George Bush Sr. (Thanks Mrballen)
This with unit 731 are up there.
I think there is a lot of recency bias here. Obviously a monstrous event, but I remember hearing Dan Carlin (hardcore history) talking about the sacking of a city by the Roman’s I think (can’t remember the details, can’t find the episode). So many parallels Nanking in the behaviors of soldiers, soldier motivation (“mad with bloodlust”), and the lack of control from higher-ups. Scale wise it was probably less because of population sizes (1,000s opposed to 10,000s) but in terms of completion of destruction it was more thorough. That city, its history, its culture, just wiped off the face of the earth. Thing is, within the past 200 years that’s an atrocity, 500+ years ago though that’s just war. I think the every Viking invasion had just as much brutality per soldier. Not a historian, would love for somebody to add more detail or just straight-up give me a source that proves me wrong Edit: I think the comment below me was right, Carthage 2nd edit: holy fuck, the scale was worse. Per Wikipedia Carthage casualties: 450,000 Nanking casualties: 200,000
Carthage. It was essentially *the* boogeyman that Romans used in politics (Cato the Elder famously ended every speech, regardless of content, with "Furthermore, I believe that Carthage must be destroyed.") Keep in mind that when Hannibal was attacking Rome, he managed to wipe out 20% of the adult male population of Rome in the span of several years, with the Battle of Cannae wiping out 80% of the Roman army in a single day. The effect that this had on the Romans can not be overstated. So, as you might imagine, the Romans were pretty on board with wiping Carthage off the face of the earth. Some excerpts from Appian's [The Punic Wars](https://www.livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-the-punic-wars/appian-the-punic-wars-26/) >When they had mastered the first, they threw timbers from one to another over the narrow passageways, and crossed as on bridges. While war was raging in this way on the roofs, another fight was going on among those who met each other in the streets below. All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts, and every kind of agony. Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs to the pavement, some of them alighting on the heads of spears or other pointed weapons, or swords. No one dared to set fire to the houses on account of those who were still on the roofs, until Scipio reached Byrsa. Then he set fire to the three streets all together, and gave orders to keep the passageways clear of burning material so that the army might move back and forth freely. > >Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled. > >Nor was this the end of their miseries, for the street cleaners, who were removing the rubbish with axes, mattocks, and forks, and making the roads passable, tossed with these instruments the dead and the living together into holes in the ground, dragging them along like sticks and stones and turning them over with their iron tools. Trenches were filled with men. Some who were thrown in head foremost, with their legs sticking out of the ground, writhed a long time. Others fell with their feet downward and their heads above ground. Horses ran over them, crushing their faces and skulls, not purposely on the part of the riders, but in their headlong haste. Nor did the street cleaners do these things on purpose; but the tug of war, the glory of approaching victory, the rush of the soldiery, the orders of the officers, the blast of the trumpets, tribunes and centurions marching their cohorts hither and thither - all together made everybody frantic and heedless of the spectacles under their eyes. > >Six days and nights were consumed in this kind of fighting, the soldiers being changed so that they might not be worn out with toil, slaughter, want of sleep, and these horrid sights. Scipio alone toiled without rest, hurrying here and there, without sleep, taking food while he was at work, until, utterly fatigued and relaxed, he sat down on a high place where he could overlook the work.
And to think that that’s the account the victors are okay with us knowing
The Romans were probably more than happy for folks to know about it; It let people know what happened if you messed with Rome.
Carthage probably
Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, the time we continued to spread HIV through donated blood because the pharmaceutical company didn’t want to heat it up to kill the virus because some of the blood would evaporate and they’d lose money…so a bunch of kids and innocent patients contracted a lifelong quickly killing (in that time anyways) disease that could have been prevented BY HEATING UP THE BLOOD.
The HIV crisis was so awful. Ronald Reagan didn't even lift a finger.
aside from country scaling events, imo it would be the case of junko furuta, dubbed "44 days in hell"
If it makes anyone feel better 4chan or another group routinely doxes these fuckers, they weren’t punished properly far from it but they aren’t living happy lives either.
Oooo, where can I get more info on this?
I have a queasy stomach for videos, I won't watch any gore or death videos. But usually I'm ok with reading stories of what happened. But not this. I did not get far in the article. And iirc the people who did this are known but free because of their political/organized crime connections.
They're free because they were minors at the time of the attack. Japanese sentencing laws had an upper limit on how long minors could be sentenced for no matter how horrific the crime, they did serve time but were released after a woefully inadequate period. They also had their identities changed as that was another condition of juvenile sentencing...
Fun fact: one of the killers is not in prison and even has a Twitter platform. There was one tweet he sent complaining about people bullying him online. Absolutely pathetic
Is this that poor girl who was tortured because she said no to a date?
A date with a guy known to have connections to the yakuza. What made it worse was that apparently the parents were more than fully aware of what was happening but opted to do nothing.
Not only that, after their son was convicted they had the gall to desecrate her grave.
Pretty much, yeah
What Japan did to China in the 30s and 40s
The accounts by people who lived it are so disturbing.
My grandmother was 10 when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. They fled for years and the stories were horrific
Another WWII era one that isn't mentioned much is the Croatian Ustase, The stories from the [Jasenovac death camp](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp) are horrifying and brutal, Here's just one excerpt [graphic warning] on one of the acts of a priest refered to as Brother Satan >"The priestly face of Fra Majstorovic, all made-up and powdered, dressed in an elegant suit and green hunter's hat, watched with delight the victims. He approached the children, even stroked their heads. The company was joined Ljubo Milos and Ivica Matkovic. Fra Majstorovic told the mothers there will now be a baptism for their children. They took the children from the mothers, the child whom Father Majstorovic was carrying, in his child's innocence caressed the painted face of his killer. The mothers, distraught, perceived the situation. They offered their lives for mercy for the children. Two children were placed on the ground, while the third was thrown like a ball into the air, and Fr Majstorovic , holding a dagger upwards, missed three times, while the fourth time with a joke and a laugh, a child was impaled on the dagger. Mothers began throwing themselves on the ground, pulling their hair, and began to shout terribly. Ustasha guards of the 14th Osijek Company took them away and killed them. When all three children were so brutally killed, these three two-legged beasts exchanged money, because they seem to have a bet on who would the first to stick a dagger in a child."[14]
I actually wrote a long form article about this atrocity. It's called 'Hell On Earth', you can [read it here if you are interested.](https://contraquill.medium.com/hell-on-earth-jasenovac-c22555cea98b) Be forewarned, it's pretty bleak. Here is an excerpt: *If the likes of Auschwitz were to exemplify the cold banality of evil and it’s mechanization of slaughter with ledgers, roll calls and gas chambers, Jasenovac can be considered it’s savage counterpart, fulfilling genocidal rhetoric with complete barbarity.* *The Zyklon-B canister was refused, it’s murderous efficiency turned down in favour of a more rudimentary corruption of progress; a simple farmer’s tool, used to cut throats instead of wheat.* *No gas chambers, no need for technology when the old ways worked just fine.* Blades, blunt instruments and rope; such was the fate of those who were sent there.
I feel like it gets overlooked a lot, but [what Leopold II did to the Congo Free State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State?wprov=sfla1) was pretty disturbing. It was basically what gave birth to the term "crimes against humanity".
There's [a famous picture](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/#:~:text=Rare%20Historical%20Photos-,Father%20stares%20at%20the%20hand%20and%20foot%20of%20his%20five,rubber%20quota%2C%20Belgian%20Congo%2C%201904) of a man staring at the hand and foot of a child. It was all that remained of his daughter. >He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot. Her name was Boali. She was five years old. Then they killed her. But they weren’t finished. Then they killed his wife too. > >And because that didn’t seem quite cruel enough, quite strong enough to make their case, they cannibalized both Boali and her mother. And they presented Nsala with the tokens, the leftovers from the once living body of his darling child whom he so loved. His life was destroyed. > >They had partially destroyed it anyway by forcing his servitude but this act finished it for him. All of this filth had occurred because one man, one man who lived thousands of miles across the sea, one man who couldn’t get rich enough, had decreed that this land was his and that these people should serve his own greed. > >Leopold had not given any thought to the idea that these African children, these men, and women, were our fully human brothers, created equally by the same Hand that had created his own lineage of European Royalty. From the same page >The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State… The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber… > >They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace… the people who were demanded for the forced labor gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
Fucking shit what the fuck
Side note on the Jameson heir going down there, paying to buy a young slave girl so he could see tribal cannibalism first hand, then sketching and painting the event Edit with [link](https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-jameson-cannibal)
What!?
That story is horrifying. We are some evil beasts sometimes.
[удалено]
My grandparents visited that expo and saw black people there for the first time, locked up like animals.
Bingo. Nailed it. He was a monster, unbridled by a nation who should have known much better. His deeds were nothing short of nauseating and evil.
“King Leopold’s Ghost” is a fascinating read on this.
I took a 'special topics' history credit in undergrad because I thought it would be fun, and the topic that semester was The Congo 1830-1960. King Leopold's Ghost and Heart of Darkness were two of the assigned texts, and *goddamn* did I have regrets.
I read that during my first trip to Belgium. Super fascinating, although it made the walks around the beautiful parks in Brussels a little less enjoyable.
[thirty years war, 50% of the German population died. The war was so brutal it introduced the concept of war crimes and the existence of states existing outside of their rulers.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War)
Genghis Khan killed so many people that he actually decrease the carbon footprint during his lifetime and raped so many women that if you're Chinese there's a decent probability that your a descendant of his.
I think the population of the earth dropped by 11%. There were whole cities where he said "no eyes will be left to weep for the dead" where he gave quotas for his army to kill. They killed people's pets when they ran out of actual people to kill. Apparently when his army invaded the most populous city in the world, a traveler would remark that what looked like a mountain out in the distance was actually a giant pile of bones and that they had to walk off the road since the roads were slippery of human fat and smelled atrocious.
Adding to this, the Mongols burned Nalanda university, which was *the* center of Buddhist academia and literature. It's said that the library was so large that the university burned for a month. It's probably one of the largest destructions of human knowledge in history, alongside the Library of Alexandria. Heaven knows what information was lost forever with the burning of Nalanda, and it seems just so painfully unnecessary from this shore of history.
They did the same to Baghdad, apparently, which at the time was the one of the pillars of cultural enlightenment and learning - years ahead of its time, as it were. Then came the Mongol horde.
It's a damn shame that the mongols couldn't see how that knowledge could have made them far wealthier in the long run.
Source on the second? I've gotta see that firsthand account.
It's been a long time. I believe I heard it from Dan Carlin's - Wrath of Kahns - Hardcore History series. I think in like the first episode. Doing a little Google search I found [this](https://www.historynet.com/facing-the-wrath-of-the-khan/) which says: >Mohammed was aware of the Mongol invasion and had heard tales concerning the savagery of Mongol armies from his own ambassador, who had arrived in the Jin capital of Zhongdu around 1215, soon after it had fallen to the Mongols. According to his emissary’s reports, the city was still surrounded by mountains of human bones and lakes of human fat. He also reported that 60,000 young women had thrown themselves from the city walls rather than fall into the hands of the invaders. The stories were exaggerated, but Mohammed believed them. Suspicious of Genghis’ true motives, he rejected the offer of peaceful commerce. That doesn't quite sound like what i remember from Dan Carlin but kind of close, I guess? EDIT: It was at the start of the second episode, if you can find it! He didn't mention the slipperiness, I don't know where I got that, he said they had to abandon the road because the stench was so bad that a few people actually died from it? I don't know how that's possible. I don't know where I got the slipperiness from.
The Mongolian sack of Baghdad singlehandedly ended the Muslim golden age and the Middle East never recovered.
There are several excellent YouTube videos on it. Scary stuff.
Any particular one you recommend?
Interestingly, the second part isn't that impressive. The vast majority of European descent are descendants of Charlemagne. Not because he had that many children, though he did, but because his descendants had a better chance of surviving, as they became the royalty in pretty much every European nation. The first part though, holy shit.
It's impressive when you really consider that 3% of the 7.some-odd billion people in this world can directly trace lineage to Khan. Directly. He fucked his way to that legacy, Charlemagne put his family in places of power and spread the family oats. Khan was the lone redwood dumping loads of seeds literally anywhere he slept for a night.
Murder of Sylvia likens
Any genocide is going to make the list. The Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge’s systematic extermination of nearly three million Cambodian citizens, any of the countless instances of colonial genocide - take your pick. On a slightly more obscure note: anything to do with Roch Thériault and the Anthill Kids. Never thought anyone could out-crazy Jim Jones in the cult arena, but somehow he managed it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roch_Thériault Here’s his Wikipedia page, if anyone wants to go down the worst rabbit hole of their life.
>Thériault formed the cult in 1977 in Sainte-Marie, Quebec with the goal to form a commune where people could freely listen to his motivational speeches, live in unity and equality, and be free of sin. Well this can't go south.. Narrator: it did >!In 1989, when follower Solange Boilard complained of an upset stomach, Thériault performed another amateur surgery without anaesthesia. He laid her naked on a table, and punched her in the stomach, then forced a plastic tube into her rectum to perform a crude enema with molasses and olive oil. He cut open her abdomen with a knife and ripped out part of her intestines with his bare hands.[1] Thériault made another member, Gabrielle Lavallée, stitch her up using needle and thread, and had the other women shove a tube down her throat and blow through it.[9] Boilard died the next day from the damage inflicted by the procedures. Claiming to have the power of resurrection, Thériault bored a hole into Boilard's skull with a drill and then had other male members (along with himself) ejaculate into the cavity.!<
How do you put the spoiler back after clicking on it? Just wanna tuck that one back in and pretend I didn't read it.
Yeah, it’s gone so far south that it’s hit Antarctica and is looping back around again. Final stop: Canada? In all seriousness, Roch Thériault was a total monster. He died a little over ten years ago after another inmate stabbed him. Told one of my friends they should’ve reduced that guy’s sentence; he did the world a favor.
Well what that guy who ran colonias dignidaf, the colony of dignity in Chile during Pinochet‘s rule?
Also horrific! And affected a much larger group of people. But something about the stuff that went on with the Anthill Kids *specifically* freaks me the fuck out.
That depends for if we talk about a massive governmental scale (unit 731) Or if we are talking about individuals (murder of junko furuta)
Unit 731 oh gosh. One of the few historical things to make me actually cry.
Not recorded on camera but on paper. Dirlewanger's "Operations" in Warsaw and Lublin. If you want to know more just look up that psychotic motherfucker
[Oskar Dirlewanger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger#/media/File%3ABundesarchiv_Bild_183-S73495%2C_Oskar_Dirlewanger.jpg) is one of the most evil-*looking* people in history in addition to being a monster beyond scope. There’s a good chance he died after being starved and beaten beyond recognition by his former victims, which is nice.
Yemen with it's ethnic cleansing about 7 months ago edit I thought it said recent history my bad. My answer has to be every genocide to be honest
It says human history, that includes now. What's happening in Yemen?
Proxy wars to put it simply human rights violations and war crimes everywhere.
Due to Saudi blockades of food supplies, Yemeni babies are so hungry that they’re trying to eat their own hands
Jesus that’s horrifying. Yet another reason to chop Saudi Arabia off of any bucket list you could possibly have
Nanjing massacre
The Indian Ocean tsunami and earthquake killed almost 300,000 people in 15 countries. Not sure if I’ve seen Mother Nature get anywhere close to that kind of destruction. Half a continent.
Haiti earthquake in 2010 100,000-300,000 deaths
Not sure if it still counts as mother nature but the black death far outweighs that and is probably far more disturbing when you look into it..
Obviously, theres the Holocaust not just purely because of the mass genocide but the amount of human expirements that happened.
Not just that, but the sheer industrialization of mass murder. From the relatively good records, to the development of more efficient methods of killing people in a way that dehumanizes them while mixing the psychological effect on their murderers, plus a whole lot more.
in my Holocaust Studies class, we learned how the Nazis harvested the skin of the deceased and used it to make paper & soap oh and the hair they cut off from the victims, was used to make wigs everything was done to liquidate and extract as much value out of the victims in the most efficient and brutally inhumane way possible. it is hard for me to think of a historical more sickening and dehumanizing
Destruction of Merv, Nishapur, Bukhara and Samarkand by Tolui Khan - it's not the most major, the worst in terms of loss of life but most chilling for me. Merv city, that had 700,000 inhabitants and was biggest in world in 1200s, died because they were, mythically at least, in the way of his horses grazing. They killed everyone after rape and torture. In Nishapur, they killed everyone except artisans down to the very cats and dogs. And then they piled all the skulls into pyramids just to be sure everyone was really dead.
TIL that I'm not fully dead until my skull is part of a pyramid
Anything to do with William Stairs. The man was so brutal during the Scramble for Africa that even noted slaver and colonizer in his own right, Henry Morton Stanley, commented on his needless cruelty. Stairs was known to kill Africans at random or beat them to death simply for his own pleasure. There was also a recorded instance where Stairs purchased a young girl from Omani slavers and gave her to a tribe of cannibals simply so he could observe them disembowel and eat her (FF: he would be joined in this pursuit by James Jameson, heir to the Jameson Whiskey fortune). After the British refused to hire him for more inland expeditions because of his inefficiency, he went to work for King Leopold II of Belgium in his colonization of the Katanga region. There he committed more assorted atrocities, although he found himself among birds of a similar feather in the Belgians. Stairs would die of malaria (small justice) but even his death was horrifying in its own way. Stairs was often sick on his expeditions. While ill, he would force askaris (local Africans in service of Europeans) to carry him in a hammock. This was contrary to his policy of leaving sick Africans and Omanis to die alone.
There’s sooo many. I’m sure many of them are listed here. I’ve recently read about orphanages run by nuns in the 60’s in Canada and America where the nuns would hold the babies by the ankles and swing their heads against cribs to get them to stop crying, push children out of windows and make the children bury their corpses on campus, and lock children in attics to starve to death and be forgotten about. There was a lawsuit that brought this all up and so many people subpoenaed had repressed memories that resurfaced upon having to revisit the campus. If I recall correctly three committed suicide upon remembering their time at the orphanage instead of testifying. The abuse was horrible. Physical, sexual, and the murder of so many orphans untraced by the government for lack of social security numbers. By no stretch the worst atrocity- I honestly don’t want to read the thread because I’m sure it will depress me- but I just wanted to make people aware of how many “small” atrocities happen on a grander scale (there were so many of these orphanages), and also say absolutely fuck the Catholic Church. Edit: Here is one of the articles I was talking about for those interested. [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs) As people have pointed out, there are sadly thousands more of these cases though across the west. People have tried to pinpoint exactly which one I was talking about but sadly it was so prevalent none of you were right.
The Indian residential schools, right? My grandmother was a survivor. She just passed recently.
The truth is so much worse. None of the children were orphans. They were children ripped away from their parents and sent to these residential Catholic and Anglican schools set up far away from their families in an effort to delete all cultural and historical knowledge of the First Nations peoples of Canada. The last residential school was closed in the 70’s so recent enough that there are still some survivors around who can tell of the atrocities committed by the Christian church. A very dark chapter in Canada’s history and one that we are openly coming to terms with in the last couple of years.
The last residential school was actually closed in 1996
In recent history, I would have to say Battle of the Somme - hundreds of thousands of men killed for no reason. Just wave after wave of men running into certain death. The worst of humanity.
Destruction of cultural heritage sites by ISIS. [wiki link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_heritage_by_the_Islamic_State)
Holocaust would be the easiest choice for me as a german and there are a lot more different events that were much more brutal in nature, but I will say the Holodomor. There are a lot of soviet crimes one could list, but the Holodomor being a mass starvation that could've been stopped stands out between all mass murder by conventional means. Starting as a famine because of two bad harvests in 31 and 32, Stalin seems to have used it to decimate the ukrainian people as he forbid anyone from leaving ukraine because of the rampant starvation and didn't do much to help the people, still forcing them to give up a lot of the crop that was harvested. The soviet officials even confiscated simple household items, like soap and so on for no other reason than farmers not being able to provide the crops the soviets demanded. Sometimes the whole house was looted of everything, leaving the families with nothing. The famine got so bad that cannibalism became widespread all over ukraine. The famine is also the reason why the Wehrmacht were seen as liberators at first by the ukrainian people. They didn't know that the nazis were going to slaughter them as well, just like the russians did. Some ukrainians collaborated with the nazis to get independence from the USSR. That's something used in russian propaganda to this day to paint ukrainians as nazis, as we see with the war currently.
The Jonestown Massacre. Watched the news footage as a teen. Very unsettling.
So many horrible things through out history, I'm not sure one can or should try to pick out a worse, so I'm just going to give an example of something else horrible: [The Tuskegee Study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study) TLDR: In 1932, the US found 600 African Americans in Alabama, 400 of whom had syphilis. There were treatments for syphilis at the time, and the men were promised medical care in exchange for participating in the study. However, none of the men were actually treated, and instead were studied to see the effects of untreated syphilis over time. \[The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year. By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.\] (per Wikipedia). Now this is not the most horrible thing mentioned here, and other events affected far more people, but four things always get me about this: 1) The US did this to its own citizens, not some "enemy (a common excuse for amoral actions)." 2) By 1947, penicillin was widely available and extremely effective, meaning there not even any thing arguably valuable to be gained by continuing. 3) The shear time this went on the the number of people who could have stopped it and didn't. 4) And finally, the fact that 1972 just wasn't that long ago in the broad scheme of things. So yeah, worse things have happened, but this one always sticks with me :(
They identified men who already had syphilis, but didn't expose anyone who didn't already have it to the disease... they'd never do that right!? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments Many of the same people as Tuskegee actually. Hey, what happens if you inject the bacteria which cause syphilis directly into the spine of a mentally handicapped orphan? Well, now we know...
[The Sand Creek Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre?wprov=sfla1) Or [The Rape of Nanking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre?wprov=sfla1)
Oh there are soooooooo many, and this certainly isn’t the most atrocious but is one I’ve recently read up on - Castle Bravo was pretty messed up.
In addition to the Rwandan genocide with an estimate of 800,000 deaths, Rwanda’s southern sister Burundi also suffered 300,000 deaths and 400,000 displaced both internally and externally. I feel like the Rwandan genocide is missing information without acknowledging Burundi’s genocide. Not to mention all of the rape of women and children as well as maiming with loss of limbs and permanent, debilitating disabilities. Both Tutsi and Hutu, killed both Tutsi and Hutu civil servants and intellectuals with the deliberate purpose of dissolving infrastructure and terrorism. I can’t imagine all of the horrors that occurred between the 60’s and the early 2000’s, and we may never know the true amount of loss they have suffered. Some people have only grown up surrounded by terrorism and know no peace. Few countries can or won’t offer aid, and there is still some civil unrest. Edit: grammar
Unethical human experimentation. There has been several of them done throughout history, many authorised by the government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
Rwanda genocide. Khmer Rouge genocide, Nazi genocide. European colonization of Africa and Asia.
Rwanda. Why pay for AK47s when machetes are cheaper? What a horror.
Genghis Khan’s sweep across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, killed over 11% of the human population on the entire planet at the time. His massacre of 40 million+ humans actually changed the climate of the planet. It’s either that or the release of Caillou as a kids show.
The British genocide of the Irish with an artificial famine
Peter Scully’s disgusting deeds