25 Worst Things World Governments Have Done

During the Second World War, the Swedish government operated eight internment camps, where they conducted among other things racial studies. In May 1941, 10 more camps were planned, but towards the end of 1941, the plans were put on ice, and in 1943 the last camp was closed down. All the records were burned.

There are a lot of crimes that the British Empire committed against the indigenous population of their colonies, but one that isn’t a piece of common knowledge is Operation Legacy. As the empire was receding and decolonization was in full swing, the Home Office knew full well of the crimes that the empire had committed. They, therefore, undertook a huge operation to destroy incriminating documents, rather than have it fall into the hands of their ex-colonies.

While a grad student, botanist Arthur Galston discovered the use of an acid to encourage the flowering of soybeans, noting that high levels had a defoliant effect. The military later developed this acid into Agent Orange. In 1966 and 1967, soldiers testing Agent Orange in Canada were told the chemical was completely safe and sprayed it on each other to cool off. One of the main usages of Agent Orange in Vietnam was to destroy crops in friendly territory to force people to move to cities. US military sprayed more than 19 million gallons of Agent Orange in Vietnam during the Vietnam war to eliminate forest and crops, which caused serious health issues like tumors, birth defects, and cancer among returning U.S. servicemen, their families, and the Vietnamese population. As many as 1 million Vietnamese people are now disabled or have health problems as a result of the use of Agent Orange by the USA. Agent orange is still legal in warfare, due to a loophole.

During the South Sulawesi campaign of 1946-1947, which saw action between the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and the Indonesian infiltrations, the conflict led to the brutal execution of civilians of the island at the hands of the Dutch. Estimates of the death toll range from 3,100 civilians to as much as 40,000.

Gary Webb was an investigative journalist from the San Jose Mercury News who first broke the story that the CIA was selling massive amounts of drugs (particularly cocaine) to (typically black) poor neighborhoods all over the US. They did this in order to fund an overthrow of the Nicaraguan government by US-friendly terrorists during the 1990s. He was forced to resign, disgraced, blacklisted, divorced, and found dead with two bullets through his head in 2004. It was ruled a suicide despite the fact that he owned no guns, and there being two bullets wounds in the back of his head.