I was flipping channels over the weekend, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was on! Good one! It was nice to see everyone band together to defeat the Nazis! While Nazis are famous for their evil deeds, there are also unfortunately national atrocities just about everywhere—and some are not as well known as the Holocaust.
On Reddit, people across the world are sharing the worst things their country has done that most people don’t know about.
From corrupt governments to genocide to massacres, it seems like you can’t escape no matter which country you live in.
1. Stealing From A Children’s Hospital
“A charity built a children’s hospital in my third world home country. The moment they left, the government sold the incubators, beds, air conditioning and anything else that can be removed. Distributed the money amongst themselves.” — gigantoar
2. Traumatizing Children
“Denmark: In 1951 the state forcibly removed 22 Greenlandic children from their parents and moved them to Denmark in order to give them ‘a better life,’ so the could be ‘role models’ for other Greenlanders, as a social experiment, which for obvious reasons was deeply traumatizing for the children.” — Rasmoss
3. Canadian Residential Schools
“The Canadian government and Catholic Church are responsible for thousands of native children being beaten, raped and buried in mass graves at our ‘residential schools.’ Recently it’s been very big news here because we’re finding even more mass graves (think~700 bodies per location, multiple new locations being found in the last month or so, we’ve known how bad residential schools Were, but the sheer scope of the problem is now general public knowledge). A couple churches have been vandalized and arson-ed since these new findings and all white people can do is get mad that our prime minister isn’t coming out and calling church burning in response to a genocide a hate crime (which I don’t think it is, arson is bad, but burning a church because they destroyed your culture and killed your children is different than burning a church because you don’t like Jesus).” —snoosh00
4. 3,000 Tons of Ammonium Nitrate
“Everything my country has done has been so blatant and in your face I’m sure the hidden things are even more shocking. Let’s just say we didn’t know about 3,000 tons of Ammonium Nitrate being stored in the port for six fucking years.” — TheOverSeerDeems
5. Erasing People
“Erasing people that are against the government politics happens every time in Mexico.” —Inevitable-true2842
6. War On Drugs In The Phillipines
“Current war on drugs here in the Philippines. President Duterte allowed the police to kill suspected drug dealers. That’s right, kill, not arrest no investigation, no warrant, no court. A cop can waltz inside a house of a guy he doesn’t like, kill him, plant some drugs and a gun, and go off scot-free. This has cost the lives of 5,000 ‘drug dealers’ with no progress on the drug war.” — Mememoid
7. Massacre in Indonesia
“Netherlands: massacring close to the entire population of an island group in Indonesia because we wanted all the nutmeg for ourselves. It happened in the 17th century on the Banda islands.” — breezersletje
8. Australian Concentration Camps
“Australia had concentration camps during both WW1 and WW2. Rottnest, the island most known for the cute Quokkas, has had most it’s time as an Aboriginal prison island since westerns arrived, but during WW2 it was a camp for Italians to be held in as they weren’t trusted.” — thorpie88
9. Operation Searchlight
“Operation Searchlight. Basically, Bangladesh and Pakistan were once the same country. Don’t ask me how that works, the bloody logistics don’t make sense. Right, so there was a pretty terrible typhoon in Bangladesh that required urgent medical and financial assistance. Bangladesh, known as East Pakistan at the time, accepted aid from India while Pakistan, who really hates India, were slow to respond. Honestly there’s lots of reasons as to why Bangladesh split from Pakistan after the 1971 war. One big one being right after the typhoo, Pakistan decided to hold elections. Bangladesh got rightfully pissed off and put all of their votes into one party. Since Bangladesh had a much bigger population at the time, that party won handily. It looked like Bangladesh would finally get some aid. The military responded by commencing Operation Searchlight. They imprisoned intellectuals, slaughtered thousands of Bangladeshi officers, students and basically anyone with a way of assisting the Bangladesh party. They also obliterated any institution that could support refugees and raped thousands more. India got a little fed up with Pakistani soldiers constantly going over their airspace to do this so they joined in the fighting. Alongside Bangladesh, India brutally beat the shit out of Pakistan, like giving a bully of his own medicine. India also had backup in the form of the U.S.S.R and our allies were disgusted by our actions, plus America wanted India as an ally instead of Pakistan. Eventually we surrendered but we totally screwed Bangladesh for generations to come. Can you believe it was once the backbone of our economy? Now a days, no one’s sorry cause the military made sure to only have the briefest of mentions of it in our history books. Like you have reasons for the war but no details of any particular massacres. Plus our intentional aid of the Taliban in the 90s tends to totally over shadow this event.” — Crimson_Marksman
10. The “Killing Times”
“The massacre of Aboriginal people, also referred to as the ‘killing times.’ Not sure how unknown this was, but it was never mentioned in school, so I’ll put it here.” — crunchy-lime-skies
11. Magdalene Laundries In Ireland
“Magdalene laundries here in Ireland, they existed across the UK too and I don’t know about the rest of the world, they are infamous in the countries they existed. Anyway these would have been religious institutions where pregnant unmarried women among other female ‘sinners’ would go and forcefully spend a significant chunk of their life. The pregnant woman would obviously go into labor in these institutions and without knowing what would happen the nuns would take their babies minutes after birth and either kill them or send them out for adoption with no way of the mother finding them. There have been a good few instances where the grown up baby tracked down their mother. This continued into the 70s or 80s I believe and families of the women were the ones that brought them there because of ‘shame’ and all that.” — tabtab99121
12. A Border For Pakistan And India
“A British Lawyer, during his lunch break, was tasked with drawing the new border line for Pakistan and India. He drew it with absolutely no knowledge or care or understanding of religious implications, and uprooted over 10 million people of varying religions, and forced them to move, causing tensions that escalated in to violence. Radcliffe, the lawyer, and his team had no experience in borders, no advisors on how to draw a border, deliberately didn’t get the UN experts involved as it would save time and save face and not give the impression that the British [edit]were losing control of their Empire. Now we have, still to this day, a war between Pakistan and India. Radcliffe burnt all his papers before leaving, and admitted that his lack of adaptation for the Indian climate affected his decision making time as he just wanted to leave. So basically, he drew a border through a swathe of religions, understanding and not caring about the religious implications and uprooting people’s lives, because ‘F*ck this place, it’s too hot, I’m going home. Yeah, that’ll do, let’s go.'” — Dynasty2201
13. The Tuskegee Experiment
“Hard to pick just one…but off the top of my head, the Tuskegee Experiment.” — RayAnselmo
14. Switzerland Selling Guns To Nazis
“Switzerland sold a sh*t ton of guns to the Nazis.” — a-fat-penguin
15. Mexican Ethnic Cleansing In The United States
“The US committed an ethnic cleansing of Mexicans during the 1930s. 1.5 million people of Mexican descent, 2/3 of whom were born American citizens, were rounded up and loaded onto cattle cars, shipped back to Mexico, where nearly all hadn’t lived for decades or had never lived at all. In the process of moving around that many people in harsh conditions, it is inevitable that people will die, and over ten thousand did. It’s incredible to me that this isn’t more widely known or usually even referred to as what it is the textbook definition of: ethnic cleansing.” — should-stop-posting
16. Margaret Thatcher Cutting Hospital Budgets
“Margaret Thatcher’s government cut hospital budgets and gave mental patients the push out the front door ‘into the care of community.’ Senility, dementia, nothing stopped them. If you cost money they didn’t have, you were gone. Literally dumping mental patients into the streets and hoping someone would take care of them. Many of them starved to death, unable to care for themselves, to find shelter or even communicate well enough. Crime rocketed along with more hate for the Tories.” — LozNewman