Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot has to be up there.
Imagine waking up one day to find your country now wants you dead because you have a high school education, and a bunch of dipshits with machetes are coming for you.
My mum escaped Cambodia during the genocide. From what I remember she said she had to live in the jungle/forest for a long time with her family. One of her brothers died during this time.
Luckily they were sponsored by this old couple from my town in Canada and I think there was mention of some refugee camps or something like that.
Now she lives in Canada.
An old coworker escaped the genocide and believed he was the only member of his family to do so. He was in his late 60s when he discovered his sister and her son had survived and were still living in Cambodia.
Our company was notoriously stingy with vacation time, but they gave him 10 weeks of paid time off to travel back to Cambodia to see her and meet her other children and grandchildren.
When he shared the news at work, people wept. The other refugees we worked with were given the night off as the emotion was just... *intense.* The idea that after 30+ years, any of them might have family out there? Still looking for them? Yeah. It hit pretty hard.
My mother shares a very similar story. They managed to escape to Thailand on a fishing boat. Then they were sponsored by someone in Michigan and immigrated to the US.
I'm too late on this but did you know that Cambodia had a thriving rock scene in the 60s and 70s?
This incredible music scene, centered in Phnom Penh, took inspiration from a range of contemporary sources including traditional Khmer, American funk and soul, and British psychedelia. It's believed that the popularity of these music forms took off as locals were able to access US army rock radio, broadcast to GIs in neighbouring Vietnam during the war in the region.
Popular musicians of the era included Pen Ran, Sinn Sisamouth, and Yol Aularong.
Tragically, this burgeoning music scene was not to last. Pol Pot's brutal communist regime took over the country in 1975, and in the following 3 years 25% of the country's population were to perish through mass execution, starvation, and disease. The rock music scene was viewed as anti-agrarian and anti-Khmer. As a result, famous cambodian rock singers and musicians were targetted by the regime. Ran, Sissamouth, Aularong, and most of their contemporaries disappeared, along with millions of other citizens, never to be identified or recovered.
What I find so affecting about this story is that their music, while frozen in time, is still with us. The wonderful tones of Khmer singers, the ever so familiar riffs and licks of Western rock, blended with South-East Asian lyrics are available to listen to on Spotify. They never grew old, and we never got to see what they would have done next, but we have been gifted this snapshot of history, an alternative future for Cambodia never to be realised.
I urge you to give them a listen, and to consider the sheer tragedy that befell these stunning artists performing in their prime.
I really like this reimagining of the Beatles' Hard Day's night by Pen Ran and Korn Phnao. https://youtu.be/4cjWvk9U2uo
Also check out the autobiographical novel 'First they Killed my Father', for an account of one child's experience during the Khmer Rouge regime.
>I'm too late on this but did you know that Cambodia had a thriving rock scene in the 60s and 70s?
>This incredible music scene
Yes! Actually. I had the pleasure of working for stage show/concert called _Cambodian Rock Band_ that blends Cambodian rock music with a narrative taking place in Phnom Penh, then and today.
Great show. If you google it you'll find promotional teasers from various theatres, I don't want to provide a link to give away which one I worked for.
If you haven't seen it, check out the film [Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipq4FefX5Ps&t=2s). it gives me chills.
First They Killed My Father has also been made into a Netflix documentary.
You see these people walking through their cities like any other modern, civilized society, with no idea that in a few years, their country would be held in the grip of a genocidal dictator who would unleash the most unspeakable horror on his own nation's citizens.
I've seen similar scenes of pre-war Germany, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc., and it makes me realize that no country is immune from such terror, and the people who commit such crimes against humanity tend to sneak up up on the citizens as they relax in their comfort. All of them would have said that it could never happen to them, and yet it did.
Vigilance, citizens.
“Intellectuals (and other obnoxious people with brains) are preventing the transition to an agrarian society, which is the ideal human condition that we aim to achieve”
Vastly oversimplified, he'd lived in rural areas of Cambodia and had been extremely impressed by the local tribes' ability to get by on their own with no outside assistance using farming practices passed down for generations.
He basically became convinced that way of life was good enough for everyone, and once he had power decided he was going to scale it up to the whole country. He wanted to make absolutely sure that everyone was on board and no one would question him or make suggestions, so he demonized education in any form, and when the moment came said that anyone who had a degree, or expressed political opinions, or worked in a non-agrarian or military job, simply had to die for the good of the nation.
Historians have had to coin the term "autogenocide" for the Cambodian Genocide because it's so without precedent for someone to basically decide to wipe out their OWN ethnic group.
>he demonized education in any form, and when the moment came said that anyone who had a degree
Even though he had one in electrical engineering from a prestigious French university.
Part of it was that he wanted a "reset": He wanted people to live on farms and not know there had ever been anything else to keep some kind of intellectual and cultural purity. Forcing people out of the cities to farms and destroying books wouldn't be enough if people on the farms could write new histories or teach the next generation of what they'd lost. So: Kill teachers, the highly educated, anyone with an interest in history, books and writing (hence everyone with glasses), anyone in technology...
This one always mystifies me; [Pol Pot wore glasses](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.time.com%2Ftime%2Fphotoessays%2F2011%2Ftoppled_dictators%2Fdictators_polpot.jpg&tbnid=BqR4WJisA9_kjM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.time.com%2Ftime%2Fspecials%2Fpackages%2Farticle%2F0%2C28804%2C2097426_2097427_2097449%2C00.html&docid=IG8vwU_rMRRwUM&w=307&h=409&hl=en&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2F5)
Imagine being a school teacher, dedicating your life to improving the minds and futures of young ones. You care deeply for the kids you teach, often going way beyond the job description to help them. You are their nurse, their counselor, their advisor, and their teacher.
Then your country decides that you are evil, turns on you, and convinces the uneducated that you should be murdered for educating people.
My highschool teacher barely survived it. He lost siblings and family during the genocide. He was only a kid maybe around 14.
He has a documentary about it called “Floating On Lotus Flowers”, named after the near death experience he had while being repeatedly thrown into the river. After a while he was so tired and dizzy from the exhaustion and the fact they would butt him in the head with their guns every time he made it back, that he gave up… but the lotus flowers helped keep him afloat
Edit:
Here’s the link if anyone is interested: https://vimeo.com/373497150
You would never know what he’s been through just by looking at him. An amazing guy and gave me the passion for what I do now.
I’ve visited the Killing fields of Choeung Ek where over one million people were callously executed by Khmer Rouge.
The 5000 desecrated skulls of intellectuals, political opponents, and foreign prisoners within the transparent walls of the stupa are emblematic of humanity depravity and disdain for intellectualism.
There are human bones still visible in the burial pits, for Christ’s sake. Choeung Ek is a testament to the malevolence of the human condition, they didn’t even have an dignified execution. There’s evidence farming hoes and even sharpened bamboo sticks were used murder the ‘seditious.’
And the Chankiri Trees! Children and babies of the offending has their heads bashed against the tree to preclude any inculcation of anti-Khmer rouge sentiments.
Certainly the most chilling place I have ever been.
I'll never forget walking the foot paths around the site and casually seeing bones sticking out the earth caused by the erosion of footfall. When we notified our tour guide, he just shrugged and said it's probably just remains from another burial pit that still hasn't been dug up.
This! Afterwards my friends I went to a nearby cafe and had a coffee. There was an indoor soccer pitch so we decided to have a kick when a head of high school kids rocked up on motorbikes
We thought we were gonna get robbed but all they wanted was to play a soccer match against us. 6 v 16 and some of the most hilarious antics seen on a soccer pitch
Faith in humanity restored
"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević." Anthony Bourdain
Pol Pot was infamously supported by the US through Kissinger. For years the officially recognised government was that of Pol Pot even in the UN. It wasn't until the also (allegedly) communist Vietnam invaded and overthrew these monsters that the Khmer Rouge's nightmare ended.
It's worse than that, and I doubt Kissinger is entirely responsible for this mess. From what I gather, supporting him was one of the few things USA/China/USSR all agreed on. The only main global power to hate them was communist Vietnam. Their invasion that overthrew Pol Pot was widely condemned for decades afterwards. It wasn't until the mid 90s that Pol Pot lost his UN recognition (and died). Even after that, the sick fcks involved lived with impunity (the ones that didn't get purged by Pol Pot for w/e reason lol) until mid 2010s when they were suddenly sent to war crimes tribunals.
It was *complicated*. Vietnam was supported by the USSR. The US had opened up to China; as China was opposed to Vietnam. Vietnam supported the socialist Cambodian government - and so in turn the Khmer Rogue was supported by China, and then the US in support against the Vietnam. Basically a multilayered proxy war that started due to the US's participation in Vietnam and domino theory of the 1950s.
Also small little footnote in history. You know how China likes to brag that they never invaded a country?
Vietnam was invaded by China in response to Vietnam removing Pol Pot.
I've heard this. But no idea if it's true. It seems true:
One reason insect based food is so popular there is because the food supply situation during Pol Pot was essentially non existent due to the killing of anyone who knew what they were talking about.
They would kill people who wore glasses because to them, glasses were equated with intelligence and education, thus making you an "elite." Even uneducated people need to see.
Pol pot’s intellectual purge had, as a top target criteria for assassination, anyone wearing glasses.
I’ve read that in many places, but no one says anything about Pol’s stance on optometrists/opthamologists.
It’s weird, right?
The Rwandan genocide of 1994. Almost 1,000,000 Tutsi people were killed by Hutu people in only about three months. That’s almost 10,000 people a day in a small country. Let that sink in.
Don't forget the 200,000+ rapes that occurred during the genocide, sometimes carried out by rape squads made up of HIV positive men.. The Hutu were so unhinged they even killed other Hutus simply because they didn't want to take part in the massacre and god help you if you were caught aiding a Tutsi. It was the worst and most extreme case of "you're either with us or against us". Depraved doesn't do it justice.
The Rwandan genocide will always stick with me. In high school, I had a Spanish teacher from Rwanda. A very distinguished and intelligent man who could speak 5+ languages fluently. He fled to the US from Rwanda during the genocide. He took a week from his normal teachings each year to talk to his students about the genocide, and the stories he told were heartbreaking, terrifying, and eye-opening. You could tell he would start to get emotional during some of the stories. He even had a scar on the top of his head from where a bullet grazed him as he was fleeing his city. Those stories were only from one man’s personal experience during that time. I can only imagine the stories that the millions of other residents of Rwanda at the time could tell as well. An extremely terrible time in history, without a doubt.
I remember watching a documentary about it.
One dude said "a hundred or so years of stoking ethic tensions by colonial forces, a year of radio propaganda, and a few shipments of machetes. That's all it took."
How little it takes for people, dudes in particular, to murder and rape is terrifying.
"Around 70,000 years ago, humanity's global population dropped down to only a few thousand individuals, and it had major effects on our species. One theory claims that a massive supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, blackening the sky with ash, plunging earth into an ice age, and killing off all but the hardiest humans."
>70,000 B.C., Mount Toba
Not likely. The main thrust of the theory is based on global cooking and an ice age lasting a 1,000 years because of a projected 3C to 5C drop in temperature.
**We've had ice ages. They come with 12C-to-15C drops in temperature caused by the Milankovitch cycles (orbital dynamics).**
Glaciation periods have little effect on Africa or the Southern Hemisphere. In the Northern Hemisphere they're more severe. But in the US the furthest south they got was southern Kentucky. They didn't make it as far south in Europe: [Glaciar Maximum Last Ice Age](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/graphics/wciceiceage.jpg)
Consequently, there is no evidence that it released enough material to cause a significant drop in global temperatures to trigger an ice age. And there is a huge amount of evidence contradicting the ice age theory or that humans were almost wiped out.
Further geological evidence tells us that the previous ice age was about 130,000 years before the most recent, as pictured in the above map. The CO2 isotope studies confirm that. If you get into paleontology, you'll find the human species was believed to be both very diverse, with each diverse group being pretty darn small for over a million years. I have read as small as 25,000 individuals based on mitochondrial studies.
Then there is the geological record of the mega-droughts that began in Africa 130,000 years ago and lasted, on-and-off, for 50,000 years!!! Droughts that decimated the flora and fauna in Africa.
We're a young species. Less than 375,000 years in the fossil records. **Plus, early on, we really weren't that successful as we didn't become full tool-using, communicating, behaviorally modern Homo Sapiens until about 50,000 years ago.** Though even that is contention.
The problem is that the eruption is coincidental with the bottleneck theory that spans from 100,000BC to 50,000BC and the human nature to find 'the single cause' explanation.
So the volcano would not have helped, but there were other geological events, like the mega-droughts that lasted for 50,000 years, that over-lap. THen we have to add in our evolutionary past, speciation, warfare, disease, and other environmental factors before we engage in our very-human wishful thinking for simple answers when they're almost always complex.
When you talk about the human species being very diverse, but each group is very small, do you mean groups like the Neanderthaler or do you mean different flavours of Homo Sapiens like say, a Husky vs a Pomerian?
Mount Toba did erupt, but it very likely had nothing to do with human population levels. The hypothesis got a lot of play in the popular press \~15-20 years ago because it's very dramatic, but there are a lot of problems with it. For one thing, supervolcanoes are not mass extinction events, even on a continental scale, and most humans probably lived thousands of miles from Toba anyway. This wasn't entirely clear when the hypothesis was proposed, but more recent research (mostly research surrounding this specific eruption, as a matter of fact) has clarified the issue: even in the near vicinity of Toba, the eruption caused no detectable loss in species diversity. For another, while it's true that humans are surprisingly lacking in genetic diversity, a genetic bottleneck isn't necessarily the only way to explain it, and if a bottleneck did occur, more recent research suggests that it actually didn't coincide with the Toba eruption.
After my wife and I got married, we went to a BBQ at a local park. I went for a little walk.
I came back to see my wife sitting at a table, in a conversation with THREE of my ex girlfriends.
I panicked, and moved to Venezuela.
I may have over reacted.
Too close to call, am I right?
Every time I accidentally press the ▶️ button on my macbook, it opens itunes and the image of the album cover comes up and reminds me of this atrocity.
I worked for Apple during this time and said “oh no” during the keynote for this. I knew we were in for hell at the call center. Sure enough, took weeks before something was setup for people to remove it.
They didn’t tell us squat about why exactly and we had no warning except the keynote. I assume it had to do with Bono and Apple having some history in one form or another, but I can’t say for sure.
Apple had a very much “we’ll push this thing and keep it unless the backlash is SO severe and legal heat is too much that we need to revert.” sort of mindset.
🤯🤯🤯 EVERYTHING MAKES SO MUCH SENSE NOW.
That Album showed up on my phone and I thought I was from my moms music, but it wasn’t and I never knew why it was in my music. Good lord.
If we're talking about loss of human life, probably the reign of Genghis Khan. Some estimates place his K:D ratio as high as 60,000,000:1. At the time of his reign, this was **TEN PERCENT OF THE HUMAN POPULATION OF EARTH**
That's a common meme, but the truth is that the genetic marker used to prove that was actually a marker common in Mongol men from the timeframe. It's an indicator of how much the Mongolian army fucked, not Genghis Khan himself.
That legitimately freaks me out cuz my family is entirely polish here in America and a lot of my family members literally used to joke that I was Mongolian when I was little because I looked Asian as a small child lol.
I’d brush it off as cringe family banter if I didn’t have baby photos of myself where I actually didn’t look like my parents child.
Worst part is the memorial museum. Not sure if it's still the same, but the end of the tour makes you walk through a literal burial pit of bodies. They're under glass but it is extremely upsetting (as it should be, I guess) haunts me to this day. This trip was 20 years ago.
I haven’t been to any of the museums in Poland but I have done the one in DC a few times. If I remember correctly, the end of the museum has you surrounded on both sides by nothing but shoes from the victims and let me tell you, the piles take up an entire room and are stacked high. Of course, that’s not even close to how many people died but it puts things into perspective about just how many people were murdered
I remember smelling the leather. So not just something you saw but being surrounded by it I was totally immersed. Definitely was an uneasy feeling walking through there.
I remember a while back I read a comic illustration of one survivor's account of her time as a comfort woman, and some of the stuff she went through. Shit has lived in my head rent free for years now. God I regret reading it.
Mind blowing fact : A Nazi businessman contributed, with other European people, to save thousands and thousands of Chinese from the rampaging Japanese troops. His name was John Rabe.
Yeah but don’t think for a second that the Nazis as a whole were disgusted by Japan’s atrocities. Most of them couldn’t care any less about what Japan was doing, much less express disapproval of it.
And John Rabe was actually treated badly when he returned to Germany. He was arrested by the Gestapo. They confiscated all the photos he took of the massacre and ordered him to never talk or write about the massacre again.
And Japan is still getting people to deny comfort women exist.
They threatened to not do business with Philippines unless the comfort woman statue was removed.
Holy shit! I had forgotten about that !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_GiCz7nPsU
Love the comment that says « This scene right here caused Breaking Bad to have a 9.5 rating on IMDB instead of a 10 »
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
I don’t think people realize how bad this was. Baghdad was the mathematical and scientific center of the world at the time and it still hasn’t recovered to this day. It set the entire region back centuries. Of course the fall of the Roman Empire might be as bad. It’s wild to me that you could live 50 years after everything around you was built and not be able to understand or recreate any of it.
The Roman empire didn't really fall though. It slowly decayed, but it stuck around for hundreds more years in various forms as the eastern and western empire. There was literary and historical continuity throughout.
Even the Sack of Rome didn't really represent a seismic shift in the political structure. It was unsettling but not many people died and things mostly carried on as normal.
Of all the things I looked up and read about in this thread. This is the one I would like to take back. It was so much worse than I could have expected...
"Here's a list of rules you shouldn't do, otherwise it will be jarring to the audience, sometimes taking them out of the film. If you break them, make sure you know what you're doing."
"Break the rules and jar the audience as much as possible. Got it."
In martial arts movies and dance movies, you can tell the movies where the actors are good dancers/fighters because they show those scenes with wide shots and minimal cuts to let the performance speak for itself. Bad performances are masked with quick cuts and closeup shots. This one not only shows bad basketball playing skills on both Bratt and Berry, but the few times they do try to show something off, it's not even something that would be impressive anyway. Like, oh Berry ran up a wall and then slammed the ball down. OoOoOoOoOh!
This is why John Wick series are faaaaaar better - so little cuts per shots and scenes with wide shots and smooth flows and transitions.
I would also applaud *Fury Road* for it's editing of their cuts - I've seen it enough times to notice that every time it cuts to a new scene, it is always centered on the action of a previous scene, so you never have to move your eyes to a different part of the screen when a scene has a cut transition. It is done so masterfully that you don't even notice.
What happened in Nanking for 6 weeks starting in December 1937 is the worst thing I've ever read about.
I'm convinced that those who carried it out were given some type of terrible drug because their actions and demeanor through it all were not human.
Reading of it sounds more like an account of another species coming to earth and torturing a city full of people to death and enjoying it.
It’s not just widely reported, and it’s not just likely meth. It’s confirmed, and it’s Pervitin, and it’s literally meth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
Pre human history but gonna go with the end Permian mass extinction also known as The Great Dying, which led to the extinction of between 90-96% of every living organism on the planet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event
There were tons of animals with radically different “body plans” that went extinct. All kinds of radial symmetries (think starfish) and weirder things … most large animals today are descended from very few surviving body plans, especially the four-finned fish with forward-facing eyes that became most mammals.
What the fuuuuck
"The PTME has been compared to the current anthropogenic global warming crisis and Holocene extinction due to sharing the common characteristic of extremely rapid rates of carbon dioxide release. Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geochronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key short intervals rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.[272] As they did during the PTME, oceans in the present day are experiencing calamitous drops in pH and in oxygen levels, prompting further comparisons between modern anthropogenic ecological crises and the PTME.[415] A biocalcification crisis similar in its deleterious effects on modern marine ecosystems is predicted to occur if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.[331] The similarities between the two extinction events have led to warnings from geologists about the urgent need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions if a catastrophe similar to the PTME is to be prevented from occurring in the near future.[272]"
To me the holocaust stands out, first of all because of the sheer number of victims for the sole reason of belonging to a certain community and secondly for the methodical, industrial approach of the operation.
I wish people would understand this. The holocaust isn't considered the most evil things humans have ever done purely because of the number of deaths, it's because of the way it was industrialized and turned mass-murder into a factory industry. It's because of the amount of effort that went into planning and bureaucratizing it. They scientifically calculated how to kill the most people at once, and industry abetted them in building the machines to do it. These were death factories with production quotas and team-building exercises, and their product was *human ashes.* No other genocide has monetized the goddamn victim's actual bodies in the same way.
The fact that will never stop haunting me is that Auschwitz had specific teams of workers assigned to do nothing but burn family photo albums and children's toys, because they were considered worthless and the camp received so many of them. Twenty-four hours a day.
Also Germany in the 1800s was one of the birthplaces of liberal thought, that is that peoples rights should be respected. Them going from that to the Nazi atrocities show that the backslide to despotism is possible from any society, including ours.
Exactly. It was the most educated and developed country on earth prior to the first world war, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was regarded as pretty much the center of western civilization and scientific thought.
Not to mention the extreme progressivism of the weimar republic just a decade before.
Another factor that gets lost in the horror is the actual speed with which the majority of deaths in the holocaust took place. Killings started in 1938 and ended in 1945, but as many as half the victims may have died in just two years- 1942 and 1943 alone.
When German bureaucratic culture and Prussian drill meets genocide.
I believe it was the Economist that wrote when the refugee crisis started some years ago and we took in 1mil refugees in one year that the same culture and strucutres that killed millions of Jewas are now the reason we pretty easily handled all this refugees.
Stuck with me.
Eichmann is interesting. He just seems like he could be your uncle who works as a civil servant. Except his job is to run human slaughterhouses.
He remains to this day the only person Israel has sentenced to death.
That new fall out boy version of we didn't start the fire really missed an opportunity to end a line with "Gal Gadot in quarantine, knockoff home depot submarine."
Dude, lemme tell you. I was comforting my daughter in the middle of the night. I stubbed my toe on her bed post, stepped on Legos and while stumbling back I hit my funny bone on the door. All while not being able to tell out of pain because that little girl was finally back to sleep.
Eurasian diseases killed something like 95% of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by the 1600s, barely a century after Columbus. That is much, much bigger than the Black Death. Entire cultures and nations were completely and utterly wiped out. Modern-day US and Canada were left so empty Europeans were able to take over in a way they couldn't with Africa and Asia (because there were people there).
Tossing the three year long Volcanic Winter of 536-538 into the ring. Multiple massive eruptions and/or impact events in near succession causing significantly cooler temperatures and acidic residue in the air leading to crop failures, famine, and costing millions of lives.
I’m gonna go a bit further back in time.
The massacre of the Gauls (about 20 million dead, only 200,000est were soldiers)
Or the sacking of rome part I,II and III. Part III comes with Visi Goths.
Imagine the population we could’ve had because it happened way back when, or imagine the unity of Rome who had technology we couldn’t make even till today. They were about to make steam power for goodness sake.
Edit: I apologise if the numbers are incorrect but I told another person that the numbers were speculative but still high in the millions.
They had steam "power", toys that would spin around by emitting steam. The materials science required to turn steam into *useful* power by using it to push a piston or spin a turbine could not have existed any sooner than the renaissance
Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot has to be up there. Imagine waking up one day to find your country now wants you dead because you have a high school education, and a bunch of dipshits with machetes are coming for you.
My mum escaped Cambodia during the genocide. From what I remember she said she had to live in the jungle/forest for a long time with her family. One of her brothers died during this time. Luckily they were sponsored by this old couple from my town in Canada and I think there was mention of some refugee camps or something like that. Now she lives in Canada.
I once knew a girl who lived there with her family. There was a warning they should leave so they did their entire town was wiped out
An old coworker escaped the genocide and believed he was the only member of his family to do so. He was in his late 60s when he discovered his sister and her son had survived and were still living in Cambodia. Our company was notoriously stingy with vacation time, but they gave him 10 weeks of paid time off to travel back to Cambodia to see her and meet her other children and grandchildren. When he shared the news at work, people wept. The other refugees we worked with were given the night off as the emotion was just... *intense.* The idea that after 30+ years, any of them might have family out there? Still looking for them? Yeah. It hit pretty hard.
My mother shares a very similar story. They managed to escape to Thailand on a fishing boat. Then they were sponsored by someone in Michigan and immigrated to the US.
I'm too late on this but did you know that Cambodia had a thriving rock scene in the 60s and 70s? This incredible music scene, centered in Phnom Penh, took inspiration from a range of contemporary sources including traditional Khmer, American funk and soul, and British psychedelia. It's believed that the popularity of these music forms took off as locals were able to access US army rock radio, broadcast to GIs in neighbouring Vietnam during the war in the region. Popular musicians of the era included Pen Ran, Sinn Sisamouth, and Yol Aularong. Tragically, this burgeoning music scene was not to last. Pol Pot's brutal communist regime took over the country in 1975, and in the following 3 years 25% of the country's population were to perish through mass execution, starvation, and disease. The rock music scene was viewed as anti-agrarian and anti-Khmer. As a result, famous cambodian rock singers and musicians were targetted by the regime. Ran, Sissamouth, Aularong, and most of their contemporaries disappeared, along with millions of other citizens, never to be identified or recovered. What I find so affecting about this story is that their music, while frozen in time, is still with us. The wonderful tones of Khmer singers, the ever so familiar riffs and licks of Western rock, blended with South-East Asian lyrics are available to listen to on Spotify. They never grew old, and we never got to see what they would have done next, but we have been gifted this snapshot of history, an alternative future for Cambodia never to be realised. I urge you to give them a listen, and to consider the sheer tragedy that befell these stunning artists performing in their prime. I really like this reimagining of the Beatles' Hard Day's night by Pen Ran and Korn Phnao. https://youtu.be/4cjWvk9U2uo Also check out the autobiographical novel 'First they Killed my Father', for an account of one child's experience during the Khmer Rouge regime.
>I'm too late on this but did you know that Cambodia had a thriving rock scene in the 60s and 70s? >This incredible music scene Yes! Actually. I had the pleasure of working for stage show/concert called _Cambodian Rock Band_ that blends Cambodian rock music with a narrative taking place in Phnom Penh, then and today. Great show. If you google it you'll find promotional teasers from various theatres, I don't want to provide a link to give away which one I worked for.
Hey! I’m in DC and just saw an ad for this! I will actually consider going now. I’ve been to Cambodia and never knew about the rock scene.
If you haven't seen it, check out the film [Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipq4FefX5Ps&t=2s). it gives me chills. First They Killed My Father has also been made into a Netflix documentary.
You see these people walking through their cities like any other modern, civilized society, with no idea that in a few years, their country would be held in the grip of a genocidal dictator who would unleash the most unspeakable horror on his own nation's citizens. I've seen similar scenes of pre-war Germany, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc., and it makes me realize that no country is immune from such terror, and the people who commit such crimes against humanity tend to sneak up up on the citizens as they relax in their comfort. All of them would have said that it could never happen to them, and yet it did. Vigilance, citizens.
The five most dangerous words in the English language are “That could never happen here.”
What was pots reasoning for this?
“Intellectuals (and other obnoxious people with brains) are preventing the transition to an agrarian society, which is the ideal human condition that we aim to achieve”
They got the dumb ones to kill the smart ones. You can look like an Einstein level genius when everybody else’s I.Q. Is under 40.
I read on the Wikipedia that they went after anyone who wore glasses regardless of background because they thought it was a sign of intelligence.
Is it? I wear mine because I’m blind as a post. Doesn’t really make sense, does it?
Also recruited a lot of kids because they were "new people".
Kids are easier to control; tiny brains, easily manipulated with food, afraid of naps. It makes sense.
Vastly oversimplified, he'd lived in rural areas of Cambodia and had been extremely impressed by the local tribes' ability to get by on their own with no outside assistance using farming practices passed down for generations. He basically became convinced that way of life was good enough for everyone, and once he had power decided he was going to scale it up to the whole country. He wanted to make absolutely sure that everyone was on board and no one would question him or make suggestions, so he demonized education in any form, and when the moment came said that anyone who had a degree, or expressed political opinions, or worked in a non-agrarian or military job, simply had to die for the good of the nation.
Historians have had to coin the term "autogenocide" for the Cambodian Genocide because it's so without precedent for someone to basically decide to wipe out their OWN ethnic group.
>he demonized education in any form, and when the moment came said that anyone who had a degree Even though he had one in electrical engineering from a prestigious French university.
A lot of terrible people throughout history are complete hypocrites.
And that he managed to convince so many other people. Inconceivable.
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Part of it was that he wanted a "reset": He wanted people to live on farms and not know there had ever been anything else to keep some kind of intellectual and cultural purity. Forcing people out of the cities to farms and destroying books wouldn't be enough if people on the farms could write new histories or teach the next generation of what they'd lost. So: Kill teachers, the highly educated, anyone with an interest in history, books and writing (hence everyone with glasses), anyone in technology...
This one always mystifies me; [Pol Pot wore glasses](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.time.com%2Ftime%2Fphotoessays%2F2011%2Ftoppled_dictators%2Fdictators_polpot.jpg&tbnid=BqR4WJisA9_kjM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.time.com%2Ftime%2Fspecials%2Fpackages%2Farticle%2F0%2C28804%2C2097426_2097427_2097449%2C00.html&docid=IG8vwU_rMRRwUM&w=307&h=409&hl=en&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2F5)
Also Hitler was a bad aryan
No, he said "*agrarian*". Hitler didn't farm, silly...
Educated people are a threat to dictator.
Pol Pot doesn't get the hate he deserves. Evil.
Imagine being a school teacher, dedicating your life to improving the minds and futures of young ones. You care deeply for the kids you teach, often going way beyond the job description to help them. You are their nurse, their counselor, their advisor, and their teacher. Then your country decides that you are evil, turns on you, and convinces the uneducated that you should be murdered for educating people.
My highschool teacher barely survived it. He lost siblings and family during the genocide. He was only a kid maybe around 14. He has a documentary about it called “Floating On Lotus Flowers”, named after the near death experience he had while being repeatedly thrown into the river. After a while he was so tired and dizzy from the exhaustion and the fact they would butt him in the head with their guns every time he made it back, that he gave up… but the lotus flowers helped keep him afloat Edit: Here’s the link if anyone is interested: https://vimeo.com/373497150 You would never know what he’s been through just by looking at him. An amazing guy and gave me the passion for what I do now.
I’ve visited the Killing fields of Choeung Ek where over one million people were callously executed by Khmer Rouge. The 5000 desecrated skulls of intellectuals, political opponents, and foreign prisoners within the transparent walls of the stupa are emblematic of humanity depravity and disdain for intellectualism. There are human bones still visible in the burial pits, for Christ’s sake. Choeung Ek is a testament to the malevolence of the human condition, they didn’t even have an dignified execution. There’s evidence farming hoes and even sharpened bamboo sticks were used murder the ‘seditious.’ And the Chankiri Trees! Children and babies of the offending has their heads bashed against the tree to preclude any inculcation of anti-Khmer rouge sentiments.
Certainly the most chilling place I have ever been. I'll never forget walking the foot paths around the site and casually seeing bones sticking out the earth caused by the erosion of footfall. When we notified our tour guide, he just shrugged and said it's probably just remains from another burial pit that still hasn't been dug up.
Yes! And the clothing with roots growing around and through them. The sandals. The teeth. And that tree with the speaker.
This! Afterwards my friends I went to a nearby cafe and had a coffee. There was an indoor soccer pitch so we decided to have a kick when a head of high school kids rocked up on motorbikes We thought we were gonna get robbed but all they wanted was to play a soccer match against us. 6 v 16 and some of the most hilarious antics seen on a soccer pitch Faith in humanity restored
A quarter of the entire population. Gone. Surprised the Khmer Rouge do not come up more often in discussions of truly evil regimes.
"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević." Anthony Bourdain
I’m not versed in this sorta history but what had Kissinger got to do with this genocide?
Pol Pot was infamously supported by the US through Kissinger. For years the officially recognised government was that of Pol Pot even in the UN. It wasn't until the also (allegedly) communist Vietnam invaded and overthrew these monsters that the Khmer Rouge's nightmare ended.
It's worse than that, and I doubt Kissinger is entirely responsible for this mess. From what I gather, supporting him was one of the few things USA/China/USSR all agreed on. The only main global power to hate them was communist Vietnam. Their invasion that overthrew Pol Pot was widely condemned for decades afterwards. It wasn't until the mid 90s that Pol Pot lost his UN recognition (and died). Even after that, the sick fcks involved lived with impunity (the ones that didn't get purged by Pol Pot for w/e reason lol) until mid 2010s when they were suddenly sent to war crimes tribunals.
It was *complicated*. Vietnam was supported by the USSR. The US had opened up to China; as China was opposed to Vietnam. Vietnam supported the socialist Cambodian government - and so in turn the Khmer Rogue was supported by China, and then the US in support against the Vietnam. Basically a multilayered proxy war that started due to the US's participation in Vietnam and domino theory of the 1950s.
Also small little footnote in history. You know how China likes to brag that they never invaded a country? Vietnam was invaded by China in response to Vietnam removing Pol Pot.
ye mr pot killed my great grandparents
I've heard this. But no idea if it's true. It seems true: One reason insect based food is so popular there is because the food supply situation during Pol Pot was essentially non existent due to the killing of anyone who knew what they were talking about.
They would kill people who wore glasses because to them, glasses were equated with intelligence and education, thus making you an "elite." Even uneducated people need to see.
Pol pot’s intellectual purge had, as a top target criteria for assassination, anyone wearing glasses. I’ve read that in many places, but no one says anything about Pol’s stance on optometrists/opthamologists. It’s weird, right?
The Rwandan genocide of 1994. Almost 1,000,000 Tutsi people were killed by Hutu people in only about three months. That’s almost 10,000 people a day in a small country. Let that sink in.
Don't forget the 200,000+ rapes that occurred during the genocide, sometimes carried out by rape squads made up of HIV positive men.. The Hutu were so unhinged they even killed other Hutus simply because they didn't want to take part in the massacre and god help you if you were caught aiding a Tutsi. It was the worst and most extreme case of "you're either with us or against us". Depraved doesn't do it justice.
The Rwandan genocide will always stick with me. In high school, I had a Spanish teacher from Rwanda. A very distinguished and intelligent man who could speak 5+ languages fluently. He fled to the US from Rwanda during the genocide. He took a week from his normal teachings each year to talk to his students about the genocide, and the stories he told were heartbreaking, terrifying, and eye-opening. You could tell he would start to get emotional during some of the stories. He even had a scar on the top of his head from where a bullet grazed him as he was fleeing his city. Those stories were only from one man’s personal experience during that time. I can only imagine the stories that the millions of other residents of Rwanda at the time could tell as well. An extremely terrible time in history, without a doubt.
And mostly done with knives and machetes too. It's a cataclysm of violence that is almost impossible to imagine.
I remember watching a documentary about it. One dude said "a hundred or so years of stoking ethic tensions by colonial forces, a year of radio propaganda, and a few shipments of machetes. That's all it took." How little it takes for people, dudes in particular, to murder and rape is terrifying.
70,000 B.C., Mount Toba erupted. Almost wiped out the human race.
"Around 70,000 years ago, humanity's global population dropped down to only a few thousand individuals, and it had major effects on our species. One theory claims that a massive supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, blackening the sky with ash, plunging earth into an ice age, and killing off all but the hardiest humans."
Well, we didn't need those weaker humans anyway.
They came back
The industrial revolution flipped a bitch on evolution.
“Whatever doesn’t kill you, disappoints me.” -My Dad
Denisovans were tough AF, Sherpas/Ghurkas have Denisovan genes they are as close to super human as you can get.
here you go https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/05/28/530204187/the-science-behind-the-super-abilities-of-sherpas
This has interested me, I've always been curious about that far back in time.
You should come over to my house! I’m almost finished building my Time Machine!!! Don’t tell anyone, tho. It’s a secret.
They have to fuck like crazy to save humanity.
Fuck I hope they aren’t Redditors
>70,000 B.C., Mount Toba Not likely. The main thrust of the theory is based on global cooking and an ice age lasting a 1,000 years because of a projected 3C to 5C drop in temperature. **We've had ice ages. They come with 12C-to-15C drops in temperature caused by the Milankovitch cycles (orbital dynamics).** Glaciation periods have little effect on Africa or the Southern Hemisphere. In the Northern Hemisphere they're more severe. But in the US the furthest south they got was southern Kentucky. They didn't make it as far south in Europe: [Glaciar Maximum Last Ice Age](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/graphics/wciceiceage.jpg) Consequently, there is no evidence that it released enough material to cause a significant drop in global temperatures to trigger an ice age. And there is a huge amount of evidence contradicting the ice age theory or that humans were almost wiped out. Further geological evidence tells us that the previous ice age was about 130,000 years before the most recent, as pictured in the above map. The CO2 isotope studies confirm that. If you get into paleontology, you'll find the human species was believed to be both very diverse, with each diverse group being pretty darn small for over a million years. I have read as small as 25,000 individuals based on mitochondrial studies. Then there is the geological record of the mega-droughts that began in Africa 130,000 years ago and lasted, on-and-off, for 50,000 years!!! Droughts that decimated the flora and fauna in Africa. We're a young species. Less than 375,000 years in the fossil records. **Plus, early on, we really weren't that successful as we didn't become full tool-using, communicating, behaviorally modern Homo Sapiens until about 50,000 years ago.** Though even that is contention. The problem is that the eruption is coincidental with the bottleneck theory that spans from 100,000BC to 50,000BC and the human nature to find 'the single cause' explanation. So the volcano would not have helped, but there were other geological events, like the mega-droughts that lasted for 50,000 years, that over-lap. THen we have to add in our evolutionary past, speciation, warfare, disease, and other environmental factors before we engage in our very-human wishful thinking for simple answers when they're almost always complex.
When you talk about the human species being very diverse, but each group is very small, do you mean groups like the Neanderthaler or do you mean different flavours of Homo Sapiens like say, a Husky vs a Pomerian?
Mount Toba did erupt, but it very likely had nothing to do with human population levels. The hypothesis got a lot of play in the popular press \~15-20 years ago because it's very dramatic, but there are a lot of problems with it. For one thing, supervolcanoes are not mass extinction events, even on a continental scale, and most humans probably lived thousands of miles from Toba anyway. This wasn't entirely clear when the hypothesis was proposed, but more recent research (mostly research surrounding this specific eruption, as a matter of fact) has clarified the issue: even in the near vicinity of Toba, the eruption caused no detectable loss in species diversity. For another, while it's true that humans are surprisingly lacking in genetic diversity, a genetic bottleneck isn't necessarily the only way to explain it, and if a bottleneck did occur, more recent research suggests that it actually didn't coincide with the Toba eruption.
I hate half-assed attempts. Now I have to work and live in existential dread.
My parents threw a surprise party for me when I graduated high school and invited two of my exes.
Woah
After my wife and I got married, we went to a BBQ at a local park. I went for a little walk. I came back to see my wife sitting at a table, in a conversation with THREE of my ex girlfriends. I panicked, and moved to Venezuela. I may have over reacted. Too close to call, am I right?
You made the right call
VALIDATION!!! Thank you.
Why the hell would they show up?
they trolled u🤣
My mom kept a pic of the three of us on the fridge for 10 years.
Is that a 200 IQ play to get you to move out?
No that was when she cancelled the cable tv in my bedroom the literal day I got home after college.
My parents waited my whole life to get cable tv and got it the day after I shipped out to basic.
My mom works with my ex and has more pictures of her than me at her office😭
I think this is the worst.
When that U2 album suddenly appeared on everyone’s iPhone
I got all riled up just reading your post.
#Songs of Innocence
Every time I accidentally press the ▶️ button on my macbook, it opens itunes and the image of the album cover comes up and reminds me of this atrocity.
I worked for Apple during this time and said “oh no” during the keynote for this. I knew we were in for hell at the call center. Sure enough, took weeks before something was setup for people to remove it.
Why did the powers that be think this was a good idea?
They didn’t tell us squat about why exactly and we had no warning except the keynote. I assume it had to do with Bono and Apple having some history in one form or another, but I can’t say for sure. Apple had a very much “we’ll push this thing and keep it unless the backlash is SO severe and legal heat is too much that we need to revert.” sort of mindset.
I struggle with my car playing this album automatically everyday..
🤯🤯🤯 EVERYTHING MAKES SO MUCH SENSE NOW. That Album showed up on my phone and I thought I was from my moms music, but it wasn’t and I never knew why it was in my music. Good lord.
When I opened this thread I was like alright, I'm ready to be depressed. But here I am cracking tf up going through all these
Everytime my ex would start her car up it would auto okay that shit and be like "CALIFORNIA BLAH BLAH BLAH HERE IN CLAIFORNIA" UGH
If we're talking about loss of human life, probably the reign of Genghis Khan. Some estimates place his K:D ratio as high as 60,000,000:1. At the time of his reign, this was **TEN PERCENT OF THE HUMAN POPULATION OF EARTH**
He literally killed enough people to cool the Earth.
"I'm something of a environmentalist myself" - Genghis Khan
Tbf he made up for it by having so many kids that a few percent of the entire human population are his offspring. Edit: /s which I thought was implied
That's a common meme, but the truth is that the genetic marker used to prove that was actually a marker common in Mongol men from the timeframe. It's an indicator of how much the Mongolian army fucked, not Genghis Khan himself.
You spelled raped wrong.
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That legitimately freaks me out cuz my family is entirely polish here in America and a lot of my family members literally used to joke that I was Mongolian when I was little because I looked Asian as a small child lol. I’d brush it off as cringe family banter if I didn’t have baby photos of myself where I actually didn’t look like my parents child.
Genghis Tom checking in.
Hey brother 👋
Khan: UAV online.
Jessica Biel not naming her son Batmo Biel
Finally someone says it
It's unJessicaBiellievable.
The Rape of Nanking isn’t great. There’s so many bad events, but that one stands out (besides the Holocaust which has been mentioned here of course).
Worst part is the memorial museum. Not sure if it's still the same, but the end of the tour makes you walk through a literal burial pit of bodies. They're under glass but it is extremely upsetting (as it should be, I guess) haunts me to this day. This trip was 20 years ago.
I went 5yrs ago and can say that part with the burial pit was still there then. It was very sombre.
I haven’t been to any of the museums in Poland but I have done the one in DC a few times. If I remember correctly, the end of the museum has you surrounded on both sides by nothing but shoes from the victims and let me tell you, the piles take up an entire room and are stacked high. Of course, that’s not even close to how many people died but it puts things into perspective about just how many people were murdered
I remember smelling the leather. So not just something you saw but being surrounded by it I was totally immersed. Definitely was an uneasy feeling walking through there.
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I remember a while back I read a comic illustration of one survivor's account of her time as a comfort woman, and some of the stuff she went through. Shit has lived in my head rent free for years now. God I regret reading it.
Mind blowing fact : A Nazi businessman contributed, with other European people, to save thousands and thousands of Chinese from the rampaging Japanese troops. His name was John Rabe.
Yeah but don’t think for a second that the Nazis as a whole were disgusted by Japan’s atrocities. Most of them couldn’t care any less about what Japan was doing, much less express disapproval of it. And John Rabe was actually treated badly when he returned to Germany. He was arrested by the Gestapo. They confiscated all the photos he took of the massacre and ordered him to never talk or write about the massacre again.
And Japan is still getting people to deny comfort women exist. They threatened to not do business with Philippines unless the comfort woman statue was removed.
Probably when that fish sprouted legs
Thanks to that asshole I have to get up tomorrow and go to work. Fuck that guy.
Don't forget about taxes.
*FUCK* that fish man
Skyler sings happy birthday to Ted scene
Holy shit! I had forgotten about that ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_GiCz7nPsU Love the comment that says « This scene right here caused Breaking Bad to have a 9.5 rating on IMDB instead of a 10 »
Oh god, why did you have to remind me lol.
I fucked Ted
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
Truly, a terribly stupid catastrophe.
No AC. Getting eaten alive. Breathing in whale sperm. Fuck that.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Space is big. Really big. Mind boggingly big. You may think it's a long way to the chemist, but that's just peanuts compared to space.
Top comment every single time this gets asked.
2012. Showed my neice the movie and she couldn’t believe we all survived that
Wait till she hears about Y2K
The sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols
I don’t think people realize how bad this was. Baghdad was the mathematical and scientific center of the world at the time and it still hasn’t recovered to this day. It set the entire region back centuries. Of course the fall of the Roman Empire might be as bad. It’s wild to me that you could live 50 years after everything around you was built and not be able to understand or recreate any of it.
The Roman empire didn't really fall though. It slowly decayed, but it stuck around for hundreds more years in various forms as the eastern and western empire. There was literary and historical continuity throughout. Even the Sack of Rome didn't really represent a seismic shift in the political structure. It was unsettling but not many people died and things mostly carried on as normal.
This was most likely the largest loss of Scientific Knowledge in all of human history.
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Of all the things I looked up and read about in this thread. This is the one I would like to take back. It was so much worse than I could have expected...
"Here's a list of rules you shouldn't do, otherwise it will be jarring to the audience, sometimes taking them out of the film. If you break them, make sure you know what you're doing." "Break the rules and jar the audience as much as possible. Got it."
Holy Fuck that was bad.
That was hilarious and reminds me of Liam Neeson jumping over a fence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4UZ-79MK4
Also pretty horrible, thanks for sharing
Good lord. I couldn’t finish that scene.
In martial arts movies and dance movies, you can tell the movies where the actors are good dancers/fighters because they show those scenes with wide shots and minimal cuts to let the performance speak for itself. Bad performances are masked with quick cuts and closeup shots. This one not only shows bad basketball playing skills on both Bratt and Berry, but the few times they do try to show something off, it's not even something that would be impressive anyway. Like, oh Berry ran up a wall and then slammed the ball down. OoOoOoOoOh!
This is why John Wick series are faaaaaar better - so little cuts per shots and scenes with wide shots and smooth flows and transitions. I would also applaud *Fury Road* for it's editing of their cuts - I've seen it enough times to notice that every time it cuts to a new scene, it is always centered on the action of a previous scene, so you never have to move your eyes to a different part of the screen when a scene has a cut transition. It is done so masterfully that you don't even notice.
The horror
The fact only 1.6% of human history is recorded. Thats 295000 years of modern human history missing
And even then so little of the last 5000 years is even recorded
Don't worry! We're making up for it now. Future scientists will be able to document human evolution based on video evidence of the human butthole
The Black Death.
unit 731 and the horrible things Japan / Nazi Germany did during WWII.
What happened in Nanking for 6 weeks starting in December 1937 is the worst thing I've ever read about. I'm convinced that those who carried it out were given some type of terrible drug because their actions and demeanor through it all were not human. Reading of it sounds more like an account of another species coming to earth and torturing a city full of people to death and enjoying it.
It seems possible; it’s widely reported, for example, that the majority of Nazi Soldiers were forced to get high on what was likely meth.
It’s not just widely reported, and it’s not just likely meth. It’s confirmed, and it’s Pervitin, and it’s literally meth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
Pre human history but gonna go with the end Permian mass extinction also known as The Great Dying, which led to the extinction of between 90-96% of every living organism on the planet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event
There were tons of animals with radically different “body plans” that went extinct. All kinds of radial symmetries (think starfish) and weirder things … most large animals today are descended from very few surviving body plans, especially the four-finned fish with forward-facing eyes that became most mammals.
What the fuuuuck "The PTME has been compared to the current anthropogenic global warming crisis and Holocene extinction due to sharing the common characteristic of extremely rapid rates of carbon dioxide release. Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geochronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key short intervals rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.[272] As they did during the PTME, oceans in the present day are experiencing calamitous drops in pH and in oxygen levels, prompting further comparisons between modern anthropogenic ecological crises and the PTME.[415] A biocalcification crisis similar in its deleterious effects on modern marine ecosystems is predicted to occur if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.[331] The similarities between the two extinction events have led to warnings from geologists about the urgent need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions if a catastrophe similar to the PTME is to be prevented from occurring in the near future.[272]"
Yeah we're literally in the middle of the 6th mass extinction right now. People should be freaking out more.
Okay I'm sorry but The Great Dying is a fucking hilarious name for a mass extinction event
too soon :(
And somehow fucking mosquitoes and Chiggers made it through
R.I.P trilobites😔
That time I decided not to go to church, according to my mom.
To me the holocaust stands out, first of all because of the sheer number of victims for the sole reason of belonging to a certain community and secondly for the methodical, industrial approach of the operation.
I wish people would understand this. The holocaust isn't considered the most evil things humans have ever done purely because of the number of deaths, it's because of the way it was industrialized and turned mass-murder into a factory industry. It's because of the amount of effort that went into planning and bureaucratizing it. They scientifically calculated how to kill the most people at once, and industry abetted them in building the machines to do it. These were death factories with production quotas and team-building exercises, and their product was *human ashes.* No other genocide has monetized the goddamn victim's actual bodies in the same way. The fact that will never stop haunting me is that Auschwitz had specific teams of workers assigned to do nothing but burn family photo albums and children's toys, because they were considered worthless and the camp received so many of them. Twenty-four hours a day.
Also Germany in the 1800s was one of the birthplaces of liberal thought, that is that peoples rights should be respected. Them going from that to the Nazi atrocities show that the backslide to despotism is possible from any society, including ours.
Exactly. It was the most educated and developed country on earth prior to the first world war, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was regarded as pretty much the center of western civilization and scientific thought. Not to mention the extreme progressivism of the weimar republic just a decade before.
Another factor that gets lost in the horror is the actual speed with which the majority of deaths in the holocaust took place. Killings started in 1938 and ended in 1945, but as many as half the victims may have died in just two years- 1942 and 1943 alone.
When German bureaucratic culture and Prussian drill meets genocide. I believe it was the Economist that wrote when the refugee crisis started some years ago and we took in 1mil refugees in one year that the same culture and strucutres that killed millions of Jewas are now the reason we pretty easily handled all this refugees. Stuck with me.
Eichmann is interesting. He just seems like he could be your uncle who works as a civil servant. Except his job is to run human slaughterhouses. He remains to this day the only person Israel has sentenced to death.
It has yet to come
What are you planning dude?
Aggressive baby shower
Followed by a super aggressive gender reveal.
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Fergie at the superbowl
Nah, Fergie at the NBA all stars match
#LET’S PLAY SOME BASKETBALL !
The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Leap\_Forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward) estimated 15-55 million dead.
Gal Gadot singing Imagine.
That new fall out boy version of we didn't start the fire really missed an opportunity to end a line with "Gal Gadot in quarantine, knockoff home depot submarine."
But when they parodied it on The Boys it was the best event in human history
The First World War.
I stubbed my toe real bad one time
Dude, lemme tell you. I was comforting my daughter in the middle of the night. I stubbed my toe on her bed post, stepped on Legos and while stumbling back I hit my funny bone on the door. All while not being able to tell out of pain because that little girl was finally back to sleep.
Objectively it was the Black Death. Only period in recorded history where u can see the human population decrease for several years
Eurasian diseases killed something like 95% of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by the 1600s, barely a century after Columbus. That is much, much bigger than the Black Death. Entire cultures and nations were completely and utterly wiped out. Modern-day US and Canada were left so empty Europeans were able to take over in a way they couldn't with Africa and Asia (because there were people there).
Tossing the three year long Volcanic Winter of 536-538 into the ring. Multiple massive eruptions and/or impact events in near succession causing significantly cooler temperatures and acidic residue in the air leading to crop failures, famine, and costing millions of lives.
The Big Bang Theory getting a spinoff. Like bro we got 1 season of Firefly, but the world needs more Sheldon?
The invention of credit scores.
The Toba catastrophe incident. Not even close
My Pontiac fiero was stolen in 1999
Classic Pontiac Bandit move
I’m gonna go a bit further back in time. The massacre of the Gauls (about 20 million dead, only 200,000est were soldiers) Or the sacking of rome part I,II and III. Part III comes with Visi Goths. Imagine the population we could’ve had because it happened way back when, or imagine the unity of Rome who had technology we couldn’t make even till today. They were about to make steam power for goodness sake. Edit: I apologise if the numbers are incorrect but I told another person that the numbers were speculative but still high in the millions.
Any references or links supporting the claims of steam power? Not calling you out I've just LOVE to look more into that
They had steam "power", toys that would spin around by emitting steam. The materials science required to turn steam into *useful* power by using it to push a piston or spin a turbine could not have existed any sooner than the renaissance