25 Worst Things World Governments Have Done

1Greenland Cultural Genocide

Greenland Cultural Genocide

In the 1950s, Denmark conducted a social experiment and abducted 22 Greenlandic Intuit children from their parents and moved them to Denmark to assimilate them into Danish culture. They were promised a better life in Denmark with the goal of them later returning to Greenland, as assimilated Danes, to form a future elite who could serve as a link between Copenhagen and Greenland's capital Nuuk. More than half died before reaching adulthood.


2Eugenics Program in the USA

Eugenics Program in the USA

Between 1907 and 1963 over 64,000 individuals (61% women) were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States. A large proportion of them were poor people from minorities (African-American and Native Americans). This was so pervasive in the South that it had a name - a Mississippi Appendectomy. The program was considered such a success by the U.S. government that Hitler and the Nazis used it to model their genocide.


3Banda Island Massacre

Banda Island Massacre

The Dutch waged a bloody war, including massacring and enslaving the inhabitants of the island of Banda in Indonesia to control nutmeg production in the East Indies in 1621. Nutmeg was valued because of a false belief that it would ward off the plague. The Dutch reduced the native population of the Banda Islands from 15,000 to 1000. This is the reason the present inhabitants of the Banda Islands are not Indonesian-looking.


4Operation Searchlight

Operation Searchlight

Before 1971, Bangladesh and Pakistan were a single country. After a severe typhoon in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) aid from Pakistan was slow to arrive and immediately later Pakistan decided to hold elections. Bangladesh had a bigger population so its own party won. The Pakistani military then 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 alongside Bangladesh then got into action and after the war that ensued 93,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered (biggest surrender since World War 2) before the Indian army. All in all 300,000 to 3,000,000, Hindus were targeted with many killed, raped and enslaved for 9 months before India declared war.


5Canadian Residential Schools

Canadian Residential Schools

For over 100 years, Canada forced as many as 150,000 Indigenous children to attend Residential schools away from their families years at a time with the intent of assimilating them and removing their family’s culture. The quality of instruction was sub-par, many children were physically, sexually, and mentally abused and at least 4000 children died in the school system. Most returned home unable to help, or connect with their families.


6Children’s Concentration Camp

Children’s Concentration Camp

During World War 2, Croatia had a special concentration camp for killing children. It was set up by the Ustaše government of the Nazi-puppet state. It was the only concentration camp in Europe for children. The children, of Serbian, Roma, and Jewish origins, aged between 3 and 16, were housed in abandoned stables, riddled with filth and pests. Around 6,693 children passed through its gates, out of which records say between 1,152 and 1,630 died. Witnesses recount seeing an “Ustashe soldier pick up a child by the legs and smash its head against a wall until it was dead.”


7Swedish Sterlizations

Swedish Sterlizations

Sweden involuntarily sterilized people until 1975. Compulsory sterilizations were carried out on eugenic, medical, and social grounds. Also, until 2012, sterilization was mandatory in Sweden before sex change.


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8Ustase Concentration Camps

Ustase Concentration Camps

Ustase was a Croatian Nazi group, during World War 2, who massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Romani, and Communist Croats using brutally violent ways. They held competitions on who slaughtered more people. Their execution methods were so brutal that even the Nazis were shocked by it. They exterminated their victims manually with mallets and knives. When they realized that your get tired of killing hundreds of people a day with knives, they devised a special kind of blade to attach to your palm, called ‘srbosjek’, meaning ‘the Serb cutter.’ They also killed their prisoners by slashing their intestines and throwing them into a river.


9Herero and Namaqua genocide

Herero and Namaqua genocide

About 35 years before the Holocaust, Germany committed one of the first genocides of the 20th century in modern-day Namibia. While Namibia was still a German colony, the Herero and Namaqua tribes rebelled against German colonial rule. The German soldiers refused to fight because they didn't want to shoot civilians. So the high command told them to shot over their heads to push them out into the desert. German forces then sealed off the Namib Desert, leaving up to 100,000 native Africans to die of starvation and exposure.


10Switzerland During WW2

Switzerland During WW2

Although Switzerland never formally declared its support for either side during World War 2, it heavily aided the Nazis. Switzerland offered banking services and sold guns to the Nazis. Switzerland also interned over 100,000 mostly Allied soldiers in POW camps. At the largest of these camps, which was run by a well-known Nazi sympathizer, the conditions were so bad that most prisoners lost an average of 40 pounds during their internment. Before the war, in 1934, Swiss banking secrecy laws were strengthened to encourage Jews of Central & Eastern Europe, fearful of Nazis, to hide their assets in Swiss banks. After a majority of those depositors died during the Holocaust, the laws were used to wrongfully deny their heirs access to those accounts.

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