Unmasking State Crimes: 20 Horrible Things Done by World Governments

The Chinese Government killed approximately 800,000 of its own citizen in 1938 by opening dykes on the Yellow River to halt Japanese military advance during the early stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It has been called the “largest act of environmental warfare in history” and an example of Scorched earth military strategy. This also shifted the mouth of the Yellow River by several hundred miles south.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. had “repatriation programs”, which forced Mexican-Americans to relocate to Mexico. Scapegoated for taking jobs away from “real” Americans during the Great Depression, state and local governments illegally rounded up as many as two million legal immigrants, and others of Mexican heritage onto cattle cars and shipped them back to Mexico, where nearly all of them 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 10,000 did.

The 1947 February 28 Massacre was committed by the US-backed Taiwanese government. Deaths during the massacre surpassed the Tiananmen Square in casualties. An estimated 500 -28,000 civilians were killed and the incident was covered up. The massacre marked the beginning of the White Terror, in which tens of thousands of other Taiwanese went missing, died, or were imprisoned.

The Black War was a period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Australians in Tasmania between 1820s and 1832. A bounty of ₤5 was paid for every captured Aboriginal and ₤2 per child. The conflict only ended when all the aborigines on the island were killed.

Bodo League massacre was a massacre committed by the South Korean government in 1950. South Korea’s then president Syngman Rhee ordered the execution of suspected communists (people related to either the Bodo League or the South Korean Workers Party). An estimated 100,000+ South Koreans were killed and US, Australian, and British officials witnessed and photographed the genocide.

During the Vietnam War, the US government had a secret military operation called Project Eldest Son. It involved flooding communist ammo depots throughout Southeast Asia with thousands of sabotaged rifles, machine guns, and mortar rounds. Each of the ordinary-looking bullets was packed with enough high explosives to destroy any weapon that fired it while also maiming (or perhaps even killing) the unlucky shooter. Charges hidden within spiked mortar shells were powerful enough to wipe out an entire gun crew. Fake documents were also left behind that questioned the quality control in Chinese munitions factories.

Magdalene laundries were religious institutions run by the Roman Catholics in Ireland and UK. In these religious institutions, pregnant unmarried women among other female “sinners” went to forcefully spend a significant chunk of their life. The nuns always took babies minutes after birth and either killed them or sent them out for adoption without the mother’s knowledge. Almost a century of women being imprisoned here are now classed as “the nations’ disappeared” as records were not kept on the inmates. The last such institution in Ireland closed down in 1996.

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.